‘Barzakh’ review: Leagues ahead of anything on the Indian streaming scene

livemint.com:

Barzakh — which means the land of limbo — is an otherworldly series about how closely those who have left us behind might still be listening. The conversations dangle on. Barzakh is streaming on Zee5, and — for free and in 4k resolution — on Zee Zindagi’s YouTube channel.

I’m glad the show is available outside of a single streaming service, because in terms of ambition and aesthetic, Barzakh is leagues ahead of anything we have seen on the Indian streaming scene. This is a novelistic, fantastical story of love and death and singularity, a story that takes its time to build its own world and fill out a uniquely textured mythology. Like life and death, it offers no easy or immediate answers.

Shot in the breathtaking Hunza region of North Pakistan, the show is set in a fictional mountain-land literally named Nowhere, where a rich old man has assembled his family for what he insistently calls his “third and final" wedding. The ceremony is in a few days but nobody has met his bride — who died sixty years ago. His sons, partnerless and motherless half-brothers, watch the old man with disbelief as he carries on.

The wedding is on and the feast is being laid. “You think it’s dementia?" “No. Love." Why do we believe what we believe? Barzakh explores folk mythology, where people living by the mountains decide to believe in a book and consider it gospel.

Some have a harder time believing. Others, who may not understand the book, understand how books can be weaponised. There is a fine line between a community and a cult — and that may simply be a line of prophecy.