Dui Shaw, courtesy of Bangladeshi writer-director Nuhash Humayun – who made history as the first filmmaker from Bangladesh to cop an Oscar nomination for the post-apocalyptic short film Moshari (2022), executive produced by horror master Jordan Peele and Sound of Metal star Riz Ahmed – locates grimy, cyclic folklores in contemporary South Asian life. The title, which recently played at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival, first began as a four-episode horror television series for a Bangladeshi streamer, later shopped to the international festival circuit as an anthology feature, the same route that its predecessor Pett Kata Shaw had taken. The result is a tonally diverse picture, from gritty social realism to a silly musical premise, that explores biblical fatalism, social mobility, and patriarchal violence in an increasingly shifting terrain.
First in line is “Waqt” (“Prayer Time”), which concerns a group of college students – Altaf (Refat Hasan Saikat), Jahangir (Abdullah Al Sentu), Botam (Rafayatullah Sohan), Kaysar (Rizvi Rizu Chowdhury), and Raju (Allen Shubhro) – who are hired to desecrate a temple, only to discover that the crime will soon unleash a series of preternatural events as punishment for what they’ve done. Powered by a vindictive spirit, the threat coincides with the Azaan, the Islamic call to prayer, forcing the victims to inflict pain onto themselves. Humayun wastes no time in dispatching the bodies, not shying away from all the gore. Five lives for five daily prayers. It is a fitting opener, suffused with a shamanic soundscape, for the kind of religious reckoning that the movie at large is keen to examine.
The second segment, “Bhaggo Bhalo” (“Good Luck”), follows a curbside fortune teller who hasn’t had any luck himself: He’s broke. He lives in the slums. He’s brutally honest at his job, which scares off customers, even leading to a hate crime at one point. His mother suffers from kidney failure, made no better by the bureaucratic insouciance inherent in neoliberal healthcare. Humayun locks the viewer in this emotional wavelength through his social realist approach, parallel to the opening story. His decision to train the camera on the unforgiving corners of Bangladesh’s social geography – infused with earthen shades, crisp cinematography, and an immersive production design – gives the episode the scathing, textured feel of a reality that’s becoming more and more desperate to breach an impasse.
And indeed it does, as the protagonist finds a way to pull himself out of his sorry state by “gambling with fate” and doing the forbidden: read his own palm. The rewards come pretty easy. His mother, for one, is no longer sick. He’s become an online sensation, thus growing the number of clients at his behest. He finally abandons the slums. He forges his own fortune, but it also comes at a cost, from spousal separation to economic collapse and a full-on civil war. Mosharraf Karim’s performance is a standout not only in this section but in the movie’s entirety. He’s particularly effective as the two-faced protagonist, allowing us to empathize with the character one moment, then swiftly making us feel sick of his greed and moral perversion. How fascinating, this descent to madness.
Whereas the movie’s first half wrestles with karmic payback, the other half is more concerned with the kind of enduring violence that forces women to assimilate into patriarchal defaults. The third part, “Antara,” unfolds as a deceptively simple domestic tale about the titular character (played by Quazi Nawshaba Ahmed) routinely preparing tea for her husband, Mahmud (Chanchal Chowdhury), a writer who likes to keep to himself. She cooks and irons the clothes, while he reads his favorite newspaper. That is, until Antara meets a young village girl and witnesses her death, the story instantly shattering its facade.
The protagonist, it turns out, is trapped in an endless loop or simulated reality à la Black Mirror (sans the Big Tech feature) concocted by the faux-husband, soon revealed as the devil incarnate. Antara can’t recall her past life, let alone her own name. As the devil continues to play doll with her sanity, she begins to figure out what is real and what is not, managing to break from his spell. This segment follows, and to some extent reframes, the biblical pathology in which Satan lures Eve to explore the operations of patriarchal control and submission, or in modern parlance, the “trad wife” aesthetic that has captured a particular corner of the internet — an alt-right crowd unabashedly buying into some outdated beliefs forcing women to do nothing but keep house.
Humayun uses the same biblical reference in the film closer, “Beshura” (“Out of Tune”), though in a far more silly context, shifting from the urban setting to the countryside, from straightforward narrative to musical. “Beshura” tells the story of a young girl (Tridha Paul Maan), who seeks the help of a mountain witch after being ostracized and sentenced to death for lacking any vocal ability in a remote “enchanted land,” where artistic prowess is king. This final segment is a tonal detour, steeping itself more in humor than in the horror established in “Waqt.” And while it chiefly ends up funnily absurd and foolish (“What do untalenteds become? Critics. Bashing the talent of others,” says the master butcher), it also manages to be compelling in its analysis of female agency and artistic self-determination.
While its stories are largely independent from each other, Dui Shaw, when seen as a whole, finds common ground in how it locates the individual parts in a broader spiritual value system that often fractures the lives of its characters. Though it doesn’t sustain its visceral, gruesome brand of horror throughout its 150-minute duration and kneecaps its overall flow due to its episodic editing, it still feels quite successful and haunting in capturing today’s many social horrors that seem to recur in a Möbius loop.
Dui Shaw recently played at the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the official Fantasia site for the title.
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