The Last Thakur

With its story of Shakespearian melodrama relocated East and a mad-King figure brought low by his own family, there’s the faintest echo of Kurosawa in Sadik Ahmed’s The Last Thakur. But let’s not get carried away. The first film to be produced under an admirable collaboration between Artificial Eye and The National Film and Television School, this is a patchy affair that sees the simmering tension in a rural Indian village brought to the boil by the arrival of a stranger armed with an antique rifle. Showcasing a clash between the twin poles of politics and religion, The Last Thakur is handsomely shot in high-definition by Ahmed, a former director of photography, but suffers from underwritten, unsympathetic characters, and a decidedly creaky denouement.

Matt Bochenski