Maharshi Tuhin Kashyap’s Assamese debut blends surrealism, dark humour and social commentary
Raju Roy leads a striking cast in this unusual story of displacement
The 62-minute film explores migration, identity and belonging through an unexpected relationship]
Some films explain themselves, and some seem to exist somewhere between a dream, a fever, and a half-remembered nightmare.
Kok Kok Kokoook, Maharshi Tuhin Kashyap’s debut feature, belongs firmly to the latter category. An Assamese-language film that moves through magical realism, absurdism and body horror, it begins with what appears to be a bizarre story about a chicken seller and a motorcycle before gradually revealing itself as something much more intimate: a film about migration, identity, attachment, displacement and the desperate human need to belong somewhere.
At the centre is Siken, played by Raju Roy, a Muslim migrant who sells chickens in a small Assamese settlement. He lives on the margins of the community, constantly bullied and treated as an outsider. His real name is Nur Ali, and the revelation of his past gives his seemingly strange behaviour a deeper meaning. He has lost his home to the Brahmaputra's floods and has been left with very little to hold on to. One of those things is his red motorcycle and the other is his beloved chicken.
The film opens with an almost mythological image of a man inside a coop surrounded by chickens, immediately establishing its peculiar visual language. There is also Dhruba, a god-like figure seen riding a motorcycle early in the morning. Soon after, Siken lends his own bike to people in the village. A deadly accident takes place at the market and suddenly the motorcycle becomes the centre of a police investigation. When Siken is questioned about whether he was involved, his response about fate, life and death carries the film's larger philosophical question: if someone is meant to survive, who can stop it?
It is an absurd question inside an increasingly absurd world.
The camera plays an important role in creating that world. Cinematographer Shingkhanu Marma often places characters within slightly exaggerated foregrounds, giving even ordinary interactions a strange comic quality. The sweet shop sequence, where the policemen arrive to investigate the accident, is particularly effective because the framing turns what could have been a routine interrogation into something almost theatrical. The camera observes the characters while also making them look faintly ridiculous, which fits a film where social behaviour itself is constantly being questioned.
The investigation surrounding the accident slowly becomes secondary to Siken's psychological unravelling. His motorcycle is stolen and his attachment to it becomes increasingly obsessive. The bike is not simply transportation or property. It represents freedom, stability and perhaps the last remaining part of himself that cannot be taken away.
That attachment becomes even more interesting when Abebe, played by Esther Jama Paulino Kenyi, enters his life. Abebe is a Black woman from Juba who has also been displaced from home. Her country carries its own history of civil war, violence and trauma.
She cannot communicate with Siken through language, and Siken cannot understand her either. Yet they find a strange form of intimacy in the absence of words. Abebe sees something familiar in Siken, particularly the eyes of the partner she has lost. She wants a child partly because she needs a reason to continue existing. Siken, meanwhile, seems almost incapable of imagining a life beyond the objects and creatures he has attached himself to.
Their relationship never settles into an easily defined romance. That is one of the film's strengths. Their connection is less about conventional love and more about two displaced people recognising another displaced person.
Both are outsiders. Both have lost their homes. Both have been pushed to the edges of a society that does not quite know what to do with them. And both find comfort without requiring complete understanding.
This is where Kok Kok Kokoook moves beyond its Kafkaesque and Camus-inspired absurdity. The film's strangeness becomes a way of examining what happens when identity is repeatedly stripped away. Siken is already a migrant, a Muslim and a man treated as an outsider. His livelihood is precarious and his social position is even more fragile. The motorcycle therefore becomes an extension of himself.
The film eventually takes that idea literally. As Siken begins to lose his grip on reality, the distinction between man and machine starts collapsing. His metamorphosis into the object he loves can be read as a complete surrender of identity. He becomes what he has coveted most. It is bizarre but also strangely logical within the film's emotional universe. The transformation can represent ego death, imprisonment, or liberation depending on how the viewer chooses to interpret it.
It also offers a sharp commentary on class. When society repeatedly refuses to recognise someone's humanity, perhaps attachment to an inanimate object becomes safer. A bike cannot judge Siken for being a migrant. A chicken cannot reject him because of his religion. The only two people who appear capable of seeing beyond prejudice are Siken and Abebe.
The supporting characters strengthen this idea. The policemen, shopkeepers and villagers constantly reinforce the divide between those who belong and those who do not. Yet the film also hints at how these hierarchies reproduce themselves. Someone who belongs to one group can easily become an outsider somewhere else. Oppression keeps moving because people who experience it can also participate in it.
The most beautiful idea arrives towards the end. Abebe is perhaps the only person who recognises that the motorcycle is still Siken. She calls him by his real name, Nur, meaning light. At that moment, the headlights come on. After everything that has happened to him, something human remains.
Raju Roy carries the film through this strange journey with a performance built more on physicality than dialogue. Siken does not explain himself much because the film understands that his body, his silences and his obsessive relationship with the bike reveal more than exposition could. Esther Jama Paulino Kenyi brings a different kind of vulnerability to Abebe, grounding a character who could easily have become merely symbolic.
At 62 minutes, Kok Kok Kokoook is remarkably economical with its ideas. It is strange, funny, disturbing and deliberately difficult to categorise. Some of its symbolism may feel excessive and its surreal turns will not work for every viewer. But that refusal to simplify is also what makes the film exciting.
For a debut that emerged from Kashyap's work at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute, the film displays remarkable confidence in its visual and thematic language. The work of editor Sadang Arangham, production designers Jyoti Sankar Bhattacharya and Harendranath Kalita, costume designer Reeya Phukan, composer Bhaskar and sound designer Arnab Borah all contribute to a world that feels simultaneously comic and unsettling.
Most importantly, Kok Kok Kokoook deserves to find its audience in India. Films this strange do not often get the space they deserve, particularly when they refuse to fit comfortably into a genre. Kashyap's film may not offer easy answers, but it leaves behind an image that is difficult to shake: a man who has lost almost everything becoming the thing he loved most, only to be reminded that someone still remembers his name. Kok Kok Kokoook is not an easy film. It is, however, a fascinating one.
