‘Days In The Forest’ Is A Haunting Meditation On Landscape, Memory & The Uncanny

The Kumaon, or the middle Himalayas, has always been a geography hospitable to the uncanny. Jim Corbett knew this, and so did the generations of Pahadi storytellers who populated these forests with folklores of ghosts and sprites long before the emergence of cinema. Sambit Dattachaudhuri’s ‘Days in the Forest’ understands this, too. Set in that same Kumaoni terrain, the short film inhabits a threshold, a liminal space between the urban and the elemental, leisure and labour, and the seen and the suspected.

When city-dwellers like Trina and Tuli — a Delhi-based Bengali couple played with unaffected naturalism by Riddhi Dastidar and Aritry Das — retreat to the forest for the kind of restorative privacy that urban middle-class life in India inevitably demands, they enter what Russian theorist and critic Mikhail Bakhtin might have called a ‘chronotope of encounter’: a space where different temporalities and social realities are forced into proximity. For them, the forest is an escape. But for those who live within its periphery, it is the everyday. Anjali — a local schoolgirl, as the film establishes — is such a figure. She warns the visitors about the looming threat of a leopard and asks them to leave the forest.

Yet, something about Anjali’s presence, lurking behind the trees, unsettles the film’s realism. She embodies a sustained hesitation between the rational and the supernatural. Anjali may be wholly explicable, but she may also be a revenant, a forest spirit taking recognizable form, haunting the visitors the way Kumaon’s forests have always haunted the interlopers who mistake their beauty for sanctuary. Dattachaudhuri holds this tension without entirely resolving it, and the film is richer for this restraint.

This is the same ambiguous ecology that Satyajit Ray explored in ‘Aranyer Din Ratri’ (Days and Nights in the Forest), where the forest strips Bengali urbanites of their social pretensions, exposing something raw and less comfortable beneath the surface. Peter Weir’s 1975 Australian classic ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ occupies the same terrain: the landscape becomes an active, voracious presence that swallows the certainties of those who enter it.

‘Days in the Forest’ belongs to this lineage. Its quieter, more intimate register does not diminish its ambitions. What it suggests — gently and obliquely — is that storytelling itself is a kind of haunting: every person who enters the forest carries a narrative they need told, and the forest, indifferent and ancient, simply provides the conditions for the telling.

Watch Sambit Dattachaudhuri’s ‘Days in the Forest’ here.

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