Invisible Demons paints an apocalyptic portrait of everyday life in Delhi ★★★★☆

You think you see a foggy lake at sunrise, but the fog is smog. As a spectator, you imagine yourself in a paradise forest, until the camera shows the forest from above and it turns out to be just a meager speck of green on a completely barren, exhausted urban plain. Even the purest images are, as it were, polluted in the documentary Invisible Demonsin which the Indian film-maker Rahul Jain paints a dizzying apocalyptic portrait of everyday life in his city of Delhi – thereby also holding up a mirror to his Western audience.

In one of the first scenes, Jain asks a crystal-clear question via the voice-over. In 1991, the year he was born, India officially transitioned to a free market economy. Who benefits from that now? No one at all, he argues, and certainly not the poor. The people who, despite the unbridled growth of their country, hardly have access to clean drinking water. The homeless who are constantly exposed to the exhaust fumes of the bulging traffic. The outcasts on the immense garbage dumps, digging for something useful.

Extreme heat waves

Jain directly links India’s unbridled economic growth to the problems that the country has been confronted with by climate change, such as the increase in extreme heat waves and a completely unpredictable monsoon period. The partly rotated at 50 degrees Celsius Invisible Demons shows how the inhabitants of the metropolis of Delhi constantly wade through a steam bath of sickening fumes: if it is not the exhaust fumes, then it is the poison that is blown through the streets and houses in thick clouds to combat mosquito infestations induced by the rainy season. Sometimes the whole picture turns sickly gray or brown.

Jain regularly introduces a committed television journalist who pushes you to the facts with her compelling reports. The film, shot by three cameramen, needs no such commentary to impress: such a wall of blowing air-conditioning fans is telling enough, as is the frothy sludge that blankets Delhi’s sacred rivers. And just as the filmmaker makes fine dust particles visible – like poisonous arrows of light that shoot across the screen – composer Kimmo Pohjonen creates their sound: crackling whispered beeps that are sometimes almost inaudible, but no less present.

suffocating

Jain does not allow you a breather, not even when he settles down briefly in a private school, with a class singing in the open air. The girls have barely finished singing when there is a lot of coughing. A suffocating and therefore inescapable film, that is Invisible Demons†