Do homes carry the souls and torments of their previous owners? Or do they seek out their owners, seek out people who fit them, so the same story is repeated again and again with different actors but the same resonance? Our souls are homes for our memories and the home is a place where those memories and our lives play out. And when those lives have unhappy ends, the same story resets back to the start until the right ending can be reached.
Chimes is terrific psychological horror short that starts out with an unhappy family looking for their new home. The father has many issues with his young son, the boy is silent throughout the film but bristling with resentment, and the realtor showing them around the house is more than happy to (almost gleefully actually) divulge the unhappy and frequently violent history of the house they are considering turning into their new home. But soon, you notice that all the stories have something in common. The parents (the father played by Kumud Misra in all three of the stories, who is terrific and adds small nuanced to differentiate each character) are almost always unhappy by the defiance of their children. This leads to disappointment, anger and finally violence.
The more the new family bicker amongst themselves the more obvious it is this the perfect home for them.
Subhajit Dasgupta shows a lot of confidence throughout, interlinking all the stories, overlapping them onto each other, using intelligent sound design to bind them into one single film. This is a remarkable and very unusual horror short.
About the Director:
Subhajit Dasgupta may be working in Bangalore as a techie for a living, but he has had only one enduring passion since childhood, and that is cinema. Born and brought up in South Kolkata, in a culturally vibrant environment, he has been an avid movie buff from a very early age, and even now, nothing gives him more pleasure and satisfaction than watching, writing and making films. After doing B-tech in Electronics from IIT-Kharagpur followed by a Masters in Computer Engineering from UC Santa Cruz, he worked for a few years in US before taking up a job with a multi-national firm in Bangalore.
His aspiration is to continue making films, both in the long and short format, tell meaningful and entertaining stories with a unique style and sensibility of his own. He considers the legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray , as his biggest inspiration. The other filmmakers who inspire him and whose style he claims he generously borrows from are Woody Allen, Luis Bunuel, Ang Lee and Francois Truffaut.