Nidhi Saxena’s Secret of a Mountain Serpent unfolds with a quiet assurance, attentive to atmosphere and emotional drift rather than narrative urgency. Set in Almora, a hill town marked by absence during a time of conflict, the film inhabits a space where folklore, memory and daily routines quietly intersect. Saxena allows the terrain, seasons and rhythms of domestic life to shape Secret of a Mountain Serpent’s emotional register, revealing how inherited stories and social arrangements leave their imprint on women’s inner lives. The result is the work of a filmmaker increasingly drawn to restraint, subtlety and the unseen pressures that govern intimacy and belonging.

Secret of a Mountain Serpent premiered in the Biennale College Cinema section at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival and went on to win the New Voice Award at the 2025 Bangkok International Film Festival. In this interview, Saxena speaks about the quiet decisions that shape the film’s form, and also considers folklore as a lived structure while reflecting on a process guided by intuition rather than exposition.

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Dipankar Sarkar: Secret of a Mountain Serpent moves less by plot than by accumulation of gestures, silences and a subliminal overtone. At what point did you decide to trust this intuitive flow rather than a more explanatory narrative structure?

Nidhi Saxena: I have always been drawn to films that are not burdened by heavy plotting or rigid structures. What attracts me instead are works that are immersive and atmospheric, guided by only the thinnest narrative thread. I don’t see cinema simply as a vehicle for storytelling. For me, it operates beyond that, closer to a form of painting. I’m naturally inclined toward abstract or surrealist art, and I believe cinema — through its images, rhythms, cuts and textures — can reach something that exceeds narrative, and something closer to a spiritual experience.

This is why filmmakers like [Andrei] Tarkovsky or Tsai Ming-liang have been such important influences for me. Their films resist conventional storytelling and are not driven by plot so much as by an exploration of inner states and cinematic language. The same can be said of Mani Kaul or Kumar Shahani. From the very beginning, I knew that when I made a film of my own, it would follow a similar impulse. The story would be present, but only as a slender framework for exploring something else. In the end, I think I am simply drawn to moments of stillness, and perhaps that’s why I love watching people sleep on screen.

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DS: Secret of a Mountain Serpent remains deeply attentive to small moments shaped by stillness. Were there specific personal memories or encounters that informed how you approached the treatment? 

NS: In everyday life, things are rarely dramatic. Most of the time, we move through small, ordinary actions. We sit alone. When I think about how to portray a lonely woman, I ask myself what she actually does. And often, the answer is very little. She lies on her bed, sometimes for an entire day, sometimes for many days. That stillness feels truthful to me. When you try to represent loneliness, the pace naturally slows. A person who feels heavy inside doesn’t rush. She walks slowly, looks around less or perhaps looks quietly at her surroundings — at nature, at small details. For me, the rhythm of the film grows out of that condition. Slowness comes from loneliness. Stillness comes from loneliness, from the sense that life itself has momentarily stopped moving.

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DS: The Kargil War remains mostly off-screen in Secret of a Mountain Serpent, yet it shapes every relationship. Why was it important for you to keep the conflict at a distance, and what did that distance allow you to explore thematically?

NS: When men make war films, they tend to show war directly, framed through ideas of power and masculinity. I was in school during the Kargil conflict, when one of my uncles was posted there. We were at home. We felt his absence, of course, but we didn’t experience the war itself in any immediate way. What we knew came largely from the news, and that was all. War, in that sense, remains a masculine domain. Men go to fight while women, children and the elderly are left behind. Even now, with a war unfolding in Gaza, we witness it from a distance. Do we truly feel it here? That distance interested me. I didn’t want to recreate the familiar imagery of guns, displays of strength or overt political tension. For me, that kind of representation often feels removed from lived experience, almost like a fiction. What feels real to me is the absence it creates, the loneliness that follows when men are not there. When I was living in Ranikhet and Almora, I saw many women whose husbands were posted at the borders. They didn’t speak much about the war itself. What they felt most strongly was the absence of their husbands. That is why the war remains distant in the film.

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DS: In Secret of a Mountain Serpent, the river and the serpent seem to organize behavior rather than simply exist as folklore. What drew you to exploring how such stories quietly discipline individuals and their choices over generations?

NS: I think with folk tales and myths, there are communities where these stories are believed quite literally. Rituals like Karva Chauth, for instance, are followed with the genuine fear that something terrible will happen if they are broken. Perhaps this obedience grows out of a kind of generational trauma, one that conditions people to accept traditions without questioning them. Within that framework, the river and the serpent function for me as forces of restriction. They exist to regulate women’s behavior and, more specifically, to contain women’s desire.

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DS: Apples recur throughout Secret of a Mountain Serpent as a motif, evoking both lore and mythic associations. How did this image take shape in your thinking and become rooted in the film’s inner life?

NS: We all know the story of Adam and Eve, and I wanted to return to that biblical myth and gently alter it. In my version, Adam and Eve don’t lose heaven; instead, they find something like it — a relationship. Everything feels effortless at first. I wanted it to have a sense of magic, as if the protagonist is surrounded by apples everywhere, yet she isn’t ready to eat them. And then one day she decides to, and her life changes completely. But that change is for the better.  I could have expressed this through people and direct words. When she eats the apple, or when Manik Guho eats the apples she throws to him, she could have simply said, “I want to be with you,” or “I miss you,” or “I want to make love with you.” But I chose apples instead, because I don’t like saying things directly. I prefer suggestions. When we are in love, we often don’t speak our feelings outright. Instead, we do small things that slowly move us toward a relationship. In that sense, desire disrupts routine, and it pulls us away from what is prescribed and predictable.

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DS: There’s a gentle tension between routine and desire — between what the women do each day and what they quietly long for. Did you think of quietness and restraint as deliberate ways of articulating their inner lives?

NS: Desire works in a strange way. I mean, I might have a routine — waking up, going somewhere, doing some work, attending a meeting. But when desire takes over, it disrupts all of that. It holds me back from even getting out of bed. I can lie there the whole day, just thinking, imagining things constantly. It stops me from reading, from writing, from doing what I’m supposed to do. So, yes, routine and desire have a very strange relationship. Or maybe desire doesn’t just interrupt routine. It reshapes it entirely.

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DS: Each of the three leads — Trimala Adhikari, Adil Hussain and Pushpendra Singh — inhabit their roles with careful intensity. What was your approach to guiding performances that are so inward-looking yet deeply expressive?

NS: With Trimala and Adil, I exchanged a lot of paintings. With Adil, I shared a portrait by [Paul} Gauguin, with that mysterious, smoky smile. The portrait itself felt ambiguous. It was hard to tell if he was a good man or not. Sometimes he seems fine, but at other moments there is a hint of something shady. With Trimala, I shared many works by Amrita Sher-Gil. In fact, I have numerous photographs of Trimala sitting and posing just like Sher-Gil’s portraits. Her expressions, her laughter echo those paintings. We also shared music pieces to explore the emotional tone. With Pushpendra, we looked at actual portraits of soldiers who had gone to war. These were not paintings but real-life images that grounded his character. Alongside these visual and musical references, we read the screenplay together to find the pace. I walked extensively alongside Trimala and Adil through the town and its spaces, allowing us to inhabit the rhythm of Barkha and Manik Guho’s lives.

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DS: How did you work with your cinematographer to let the landscapes and interiors carry as much emotional weight as the performances themselves?

NS: I think Vikas and I did a very extensive pre-production and shot design using just our phones. We would walk, act out scenes and record everything on the phone. I wanted the water to feel magical. The mountains, at times, needed to feel like a kind of prison — not just the stunning landscape, but something that could feel confining. I was very particular about the colors, so we discussed light and palette in detail. We also had long debates about the camera itself, whether the film should remain static or include movement, using tracking shots and the trolley.

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DS: The sound design and music are deeply entwined with the characters’ emotional states, often blurring the line between inner thought and the outer world. Voices drift in, while ambient sounds and songs appear almost like thoughts. What was your process in shaping this aural world?

NS: Sound design is the most important thing for me, because I deliberately leave gaps in the narrative to be filled with sound. I never want to say things directly with words. Instead, I let the sound do the work. Sound is, for me, a fabulous tool. I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked on this film, since we had to complete it in 10 months. Otherwise, I would have explored even more possibilities with sound. Listening back now, I feel there are still a few things I would have loved to do.

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DS. This being your second feature, how has your engagement with storytelling evolved since your debut, and what kinds of questions or ideas do you now feel more willing to explore?

NS: When I was doing the post-production of my first feature, I joined the Venice Biennale lab to work on my second film. I think the two films are very different. My first film was set entirely in a house, while this one takes place mostly outdoors, in the mountains. It also has a larger cast, and this film has many characters, whereas the first had just two. That film was essentially a love story — not a straightforward one but more complex. I wouldn’t say my approach “evolved,” but with this second film, I moved outdoors and expanded the character scope. For my third film, I think I’m aiming for something different… a more plot-driven story. After making two experimental, non-narrative, atmospheric, immersive films, I’m now eager to explore a structured narrative.

Dipankar Sarkar (@Dipankar_Tezpur) is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic based in India. As a freelancer, he regularly contributes to various Indian publications on cinema-related topics.

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