(Aadish Keluskar, India, 2015, 122mins) With camerawork and sound design that bring a visceral sense of dislocation, Aadish Keluskar’s bold and innovative Kaul can only be described as a truly transformative cinematic experience.

A schoolteacher stops to offer an old man a light for his cigarette on his way back home one night, and encounters a supernatural experience that he is unable to explain. Left shaken to his core, and unable to ascertain its authenticity, he begins to doubt his very mind, until he meets the old man again and learns that he is the “chosen one.” Now is the true test of his sanity, whether to believe his “believer” and commit a crime, or to admit to his own insanity.

Deeply inspired by the films of Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr, and firmly rooted in a Marathi milieu, Keluskar masterfully walks a fine line between the believable and the unbelievable, and delivers a unique film that brings an equal measure of the mystical, the existential, the surreal, and the sublime.