Maya Satya Bhram by Samik Roy Choudhury defies categorisation. It begins as a case involving a missing person, veers into mysticism, veers into social criticism, pauses for philosophy, and occasionally recalls that it is also a police procedural. This restlessness is the film's strength as much as its weakness.
The story is set in motion by a pair of vanishings that rattle the Prafulla Nagar police station in Kolkata. Totoro, the eight-year-old son of Inspector Sanjay Konwar, disappears without a trace. Around the same time, Sara Nielsen, a Swedish researcher who had spent months studying shamanic traditions in the region, goes missing as well — last seen after a long interview with a mysterious godman known as Trilokadarshi Baba, or simply Babaji. As Inspector Sanjay digs through Sara's old recordings looking for a thread connecting the two cases, the film slowly peels back layers of faith, manipulation, grief, and something far darker than either investigation initially suggests.
Samik tells this story out of order, cutting between timelines, testimonies, and half-remembered footage rather than laying events out in sequence. It's a structure that turns the film into something closer to a puzzle than a straightforward thriller, and for the most part, it works — the fragmented approach mirrors the uncertainty at the heart of the story itself, where nobody, including the audience, is quite sure what actually happened and what's been imagined or performed.
The film's most compelling creation is Babaji himself. Samik wisely never tips his hand about whether the man is a fraud, a genuine mystic, or something in between — he's left as an open question, and through him the film quietly indicts the way Indian society tends to hand godmen unconditional reverence, no questions asked. Carrying that ambiguity is Sanat Chattopadhyay, who plays the role almost entirely through stillness and expression rather than dialogue. It's a genuinely striking piece of screen presence, made more impressive by the fact that this is his acting debut.
The investigation side of the film is anchored by Soham Majumdar as the police officer piecing the case together, and he brings a grounded steadiness that the film needs whenever it threatens to float off into abstraction. Priyanka Sarkar, as the missing boy's mother, supplies the emotional core — her grief feels lived-in rather than performed for effect, and she's the one who keeps the human stakes of the story from getting buried under its bigger ideas. Also worth singling out is Subrata Dutta, who plays the criminal Kana Prasen with a kind of unsettling, coiled menace; he doesn't get the most screen time, but he leaves a mark, giving the film's underworld strand a genuine sense of threat.
Where the film runs into trouble is sheer volume. There are simply too many characters, subplots, and tonal detours competing for space. There's a stray science-fiction sequence in particular which feels like it wandered in from a different movie entirely and could easily have been cut. The editing keeps things moving at a brisk pace, which mostly works in the film's favour given how much ground it's covering, but the density of material means momentum stalls in places, and a more disciplined edit would have let some of the film's better ideas breathe instead of rushing past them.
Still, it's hard to walk away from Maya Satya Bhram unimpressed by its ambition. Some of it should have been trimmed, some of it could have been left unsaid rather than spelled out, but the film's central question — what people choose to believe, and what they'd rather not examine too closely — lingers well after the credits roll.
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