Rakter Swad – review

Director: Dhruba Dutta

 Release date: 1993

Contains spoilers

Facebook friend Prodosh recently suggested three Bengali films I might like to check out. A quick google was actually successful in uncovering two of those three, with English subs. This is the second of the two I found that I’ve watched/reviewed. Listed as Rakter Saad on IMDb, Prodosh did warn me that this was a turkey but also informed me that Rakter Swad translates to Taste of/for Blood.

And it is every inch the turkey, I’m afraid, though it conceptually plays with the genre quite nicely, at least in  a couple of places. It owes a debt to a film 60 years its predecessor, though be warned that checking that film will utterly spoil the twist in this one (which I may end up spoiling anyway, as it goes).

woman with the body

So, it begins with a view of an old woman leaning over the motionless body of a young boy. A mob of men are running towards her and she flees but they eventually catch her and she cries that she is not a witch. Her son tries to stop the mob from killing her but they drag him away and a woman tries to intervene to no avail. The first blow is to fall as we cut to the opening credits and the bizarre use of music – the credit soundtrack is a dance/disco instrumental version of Jeff Lynne’s the Eve of the War, which then moves into an equally strange instrumental version of Blue Monday and back to the Eve of the War.

child victim

After the credits we get a dinner with the Chief of Police and newly transferred senior police officer Mitra. Mitra’s wife and his sister, Ronnie, are also at dinner. Ronnie has just got into college. Mitra’s meal is cut short when he is called out to the attack. The men are still around their victim and the old woman is barely alive. After a couple of random moments of police brutality, Mitra asks what has happened and then berates one of his officers for not sending the woman to hospital. At the hospital (referred to as a nursing home in the subs) he asks the cause of death of the boy and is told blood loss.

the hospital

Back at the station a man is telling the others gathered there that the woman was a witch and used her long tongue to draw the blood from the chest of the child. When Mithra arrives there he berates his officer for sending the woman to the nearby nursing home and not the more distant Government Hospital. He then listens dismissively to what the men have to say. They suggest she drank the blood not only of the child but of ten children, this one being the latest (note there is no follow up on this rumour of mass infanticide). Having consumed the blood of ten she can now kill herself on the night of the new moon (that night) and then possess who she chooses – turning them into a vampire.

Ronnie, is she possessed?

So, that night the woman dies following a dive through the hospital window. Now the film deliberately does not show us this but any sense of mystery might be confounded by the POV camera going to her room, indicating an assailant who murders her… though perhaps this is a double blind or, even, perhaps the folklore is wrong and she just needs to die rather than killing herself? Be that as it may there is a rash of murders that follows and the victims are exsanguinated.

skeletal hand

The vampire’s method is interesting, strangling the victim and then sucking the blood from the chest (though when we see a young boy attacked the blood appears to be at the neck). We do see an attack involving a woman with a skeletal hand (though it looks really false) and a messed up face. However the police are sceptical and we might have a serial killer who acts like a vampire, a vampire (and the victim of vampiric possession) or something else altogether.

vision of a vampire

Ronnie, unfortunately, becomes utterly convinced that she is the vampire – with evidence putting her at two of the crime scenes (in the case of Bobby, a young child who is murdered, she has blood on her hands that Mitra washes off before anyone sees, rationalising that there was blood everywhere and she innocently got it on her; in the case of her new boyfriend, the circumstantial evidence is that she had been with him just prior to the murder). Ronnie is described as being prone to an overactive imagination and also prone to mental health issues. We see her freak out when she has a vision of a vampire – that might just be daydreaming or hallucination.

yes there is song and dance

The film overstays its welcome, considerably, coming in with a running time of 2 and a half hours it really could have shaved an hour off that comfortably. The twist pay-off is unsatisfying. There is a huge amount of dodgy police activity – seduction (though the affections seem to be mutual) whilst undercover and so lying about identity, police brutality, destroying evidence and even coercion to search a room (on a case that would seem to have nothing to do with the film we’re watching). The story doesn’t hang together well and despite some interesting aspects, such as the strangulation, the feeding from the chest and the possession concept, I found this one to be poor. 2 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.