In the story of the Garden of Eden, the serpent has always stood for desire — the moment a human being first crossed the lines of obedience and sought knowledge for themselves through the forbidden apple. That act of reaching for something just outside our reach has followed us through centuries of storytelling, as a reminder that desire is inseparable from awareness. It is what makes us conscious of our own limits and our need to cross them. The serpent, in that sense, is not an antagonist but a mirror of our most human impulse: to want and to know.

From this symbol, Nidhi Saxena’s 'Secret of a Mountain Serpent' draws its power. Set in the village of Almora during the Kargil war, the film reimagines the serpent’s promise through the story of Barkha, (Trimala Adhikari) a woman whose husband (Pushpendra Singh) has gone to the front. As she waits for his return, desire begins to take on new shapes — memory, guilt, imagination, and the presence of a visiting writer (Adil Hussain) who stirs something long dormant.

Nidhi Saxena began her career as a painter and sculptor before moving into filmmaking. An FTII-trained filmmaker, she became the first Indian woman to receive the grant from the Biennale College Cinema programme in Venice, where her sophomore film 'Secret of a Mountain Serpent' premiered at their 2025 film festival. Most recently, the film won the 'New Voices/Best New Director' prize at the 2025 Bangkok International Film Festival and is having its Indian premiere at the Dharamshala International Film Festival this year.

The film is tied together through long, poetic sequences where the the intention is less to move forward in the plotline than to go deeper into it. It moves through moments of daily life and the internal monologue that Barkha is going through, even if it's without words. With both her husband that she misses deeply and the writer who has piqued her interest, it is through her imaginary conversations with them that we, as viewers, interact with the men in her life. These fathomless inner worlds that the film depicts with its sublime visual cues become its narrative center.

And so does the magical realism that is woven into its fibre. The mythic folklore of a serpent that shows itself only to the women of Almora, and the implication that the mysterious new writer may himself be this shape-shifting creature has an arresting presence within the story. This phantasmagorical reality speaks to the intellectual nature of man that has long used magic as a way to understand the inexplicable things going on inside him. And Barkha's relationship with this creature, that's not lustful yet deeply romantic, is precisely that.

From the clockwork-ish, outward gaze through which we often look at time in a film: like the day turning into night, or the hours passing by, Nidhi takes us into the relative nature of time and the sensorial way our bodies experience it. She shows us the way we forget it; when it's so entangled with our being that the units we measure it through become irrelevant and all that's left is a flow state. 'Secret of a Mountain Serpent' is deceptive in the way it fools you with its 'slow' pacing but a moment later you're already 2 hours into its runtime. The surreality of the film, thus, seeps outside of it into the viewers' experience of it as well.

There is a distinctly feminine intelligence guiding the film. Its depiction of women's lives touches upon themes of devotion, contempt, surveillance, curiosity, and a rebellion so graceful that it borders on flirtation. The women of Almora are collectively subjected to waiting and yearning as a form of existence. But there is also an indulgence in temptation that this yearning leads them towards which feels cathartic.

As a woman of this generation, the film seems to be a spiritual cousin to the enriching shift we have been experiencing that is rooted in the philosophy of decentering men, privileging female friendships, and being an ungovernable swamp witch. Somewhere between its thematic centers of loneliness, longing, and affection, and its ancient allegories of the snake, the apple, and the alluring call of the river, 'Secret of a Mountain Serpent' is a poignant depiction of the female condition.

Follow Nidhi Saxena here and watch the trailer for the film below:

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