Four years ago, Mejbaur Rahman Sumon released the first feature film of his career. Hawa was, among other things, an exercise in counter-mythology. It was a deliberate inversion of the familiar story of Chand Saudagar and the goddess Manasa.

While thinking about the film, I became preoccupied with a seemingly simple question: Why Hawa?

The answer may be hidden in mythology itself. In Manasamangal, one of Manasa's names is Jagadgauri, the life-giving mother of creation. In Hebrew tradition, meanwhile, Hawa—or Eve—literally means "Mother of All Living."

Whether coincidence or design, the parallel felt too suggestive to ignore. It offered a clue, and probably to the director's method. From that point on, I found myself approaching Sumon's work with greater caution and greater curiosity.

After a long silence came his second film, Roid. Almost immediately, social media filled with interpretations. Viewers assembled elaborate collages of symbols and metaphors. Discussions spiraled through references to Adam and Eve, forbidden fruit, creation myths, and biblical archetypes.

I even came across a reel in which someone confidently declared that understanding the film required an extensive education in aesthetics.

A single film had managed to produce a familiar cultural divide… those who supposedly "got it" and those who did not; the initiated and the excluded.

Yet artists, like everyone else, tend to leave fingerprints. Every creative mind develops recurring obsessions, preferred structures, and recognizable habits of thought. Signatures emerge.

My own reading of Hawa left me with the impression that Sumon is deeply interested in the intersection of local and global mythologies, and that he gravitates toward rewriting inherited narratives from the margins rather than repeating them from the center.

Viewed through that lens, Roid becomes less mysterious. Its central character, played by Nazifa Tushi, is nameless. She is mentally unstable, perhaps even mad. She has left one husband and is abandoned by another in an unfamiliar landscape under the cover of darkness.

Faced with these details, it did not take me long to arrive at a working hypothesis: Sumon's latest film is, at its core, about Lilith.

Which raises another question. If the film is really engaging with Lilith, why is it called Roid?

The title itself may contain another clue…a coded message hiding in plain sight.

Consider the word "Lilith." Replace the initial "L" with the preceding consonant "R." Replace the ending "th" with the following consonant "d." Substitute the vowel sign with the standalone vowel "i." Suddenly, "Lilith" begins to resemble "Roid." The transformation recalls one of the oldest techniques in cryptography: the substitution cipher.

The principle is ancient. It dates back at least to Julius Caesar, who famously encrypted military correspondence by systematically shifting letters within the alphabet. As the cryptographer Simon Singh explains in The Code Book, a substitution cipher works by replacing each letter with another letter or symbol according to a predetermined system.

The Caesar cipher is simply the most famous example of the form.

Whether or not this particular reading is correct, the larger question remains…why would Lilith need to become Roid at all?

The answer may lie in the same impulse that animated Hawa. If Sumon's artistic project is indeed one of counter-mythology—of challenging inherited narratives by rewriting them from unexpected perspectives—then the concealment is not incidental.

It is the point.

Nightfall

The association is difficult to miss.

In Hebrew, Layla means "night." In Akkadian, Lilitu carries a similar meaning: darkness, the nocturnal world, the realm beyond daylight's reach. Across the textual afterlife of Lilith—from biblical references to later Jewish folklore—darkness is rarely incidental.

Whenever her presence is suspected, sunlight recedes. Night arrives. Shadows lengthen.

To understand what Roid is doing with this inheritance, it is necessary to revisit the myth itself.

Long before Eve entered the story, some strands of Hebrew mythology imagined another woman at Adam's side. Lilith, unlike Eve, was not fashioned from Adam's body. She was created alongside him, from the same earth, at the same moment. Equality was built into her origin.

That equality quickly became the source of conflict.

Adam demanded hierarchy; Lilith rejected it. The dispute is often framed in startlingly physical terms. Adam insisted on a position of dominance. Lilith refused, arguing that neither could claim superiority over the other because both had emerged from the same soil. The disagreement was ontological. It concerned the nature of power itself.

When no compromise proved possible, Lilith left.

The mythology remembers her departure as an act of flight. She escaped Eden and traveled toward the Red Sea, abandoning the first human household rather than submitting to it.

Adam appealed to God, who dispatched three angels—Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof—to retrieve her. They found her, threatened her, and warned her of terrible consequences if she refused to return.

She refused anyway.

The decision transformed her place in the tradition. The woman who rejected subordination became, in later retellings, a demon. She was recast as a creature of exile, associated with monstrous offspring, haunted landscapes, and dangers lurking around childbirth and infancy.

The mythology punished her rebellion by converting independence into monstrosity.

Yet the story did not end there. Medieval Jewish mysticism complicated the narrative further. In some versions, Lilith never truly disappears. She returns—not as wife but as infiltrator, not openly but in disguise. The rejected woman becomes a hidden presence at the edges of Adam and Eve's new life.

Three symbols follow her almost everywhere: the serpent, the owl, and the lion. Together they form a kind of visual vocabulary through which later traditions recognize her.

This is where mythology ends and Roid begins.

The film's most provocative move is to reverse its direction. If Adam ultimately replaced Lilith with Eve, what happens when the abandoned figure seeks a replacement of her own? What would a world look like in which Lilith, rather than Adam, becomes the chooser?

Seen this way, the film begins to reveal its organizing question.

The woman at its center has already left one man behind. The implication is significant. The Sadhu we encounter is not Adam but a successor, a second attempt, a second companion. Nor does this reimagined Lilith arrive carrying the familiar emblems of myth.

There are no serpents coiled at her feet, no owls perched nearby. Instead, her closest companion is a goat. She tends fish. The supernatural demon of folklore is translated into a social category more familiar and perhaps more unsettling: the village madwoman.

The transformation is evident from her first appearance. Children taunt her. Adults regard her with suspicion. Stories circulate around her volatility. Later, we learn that she has injured a child with a stone and fought physically with other women.

The legendary threat associated with Lilith is stripped of its supernatural language and relocated within ordinary social life.

The result is not a demon but a woman whom society has already marked as unmanageable.

From that perspective, her abandonment becomes almost inevitable. No husband in this world wishes to sustain a household with someone perceived as unstable. And so she is left behind in the forest under cover of darkness…precisely the element that has shadowed Lilith throughout centuries of mythology.

The next morning, the man returns home beneath a sky flooded with sunlight.

The contrast feels too deliberate to ignore.

The logic of reversal

The original rupture between Adam and Lilith was, at its core, a dispute over power expressed through sexuality.

Their conflict was not simply about desire but about hierarchy…who would occupy the dominant position and who would submit. Once that lens is brought to Roid, several otherwise disconnected moments begin to align.

The film's central woman repeatedly denies Sadhu sexual access. On at least two occasions she resists him outright. In one scene, the refusal escalates into a physical struggle. The encounter is easy to read as marital discord. It becomes more revealing when placed beside the film's visual vocabulary.

The opening sequence shows Shadu herding cattle and buffaloes. Among them, one buffalo mounts another. Later, the film returns to a similar agricultural setting, where powerful breeding bulls mount cows brought to them for impregnation.

Sumon lingers on these images with unusual attention. In a close shot, the camera even records the bull's erection. Such moments are too deliberate to dismiss the rural atmosphere.

The film is quietly constructing an argument. Sexuality appears less as romance than as a field of power. Animal reproduction becomes a visual shorthand for a world governed by instinct and biological authority. Against that backdrop, the protagonist's refusals acquire a different meaning. They reopen the ancient conflict embedded in the Lilith myth itself.

In another cinematic tradition—particularly in contemporary Western art-house cinema—the same thematic concern might have been explored through repeated scenes of failed intimacy.

But Roid operates under different conditions. Sumon's adaptation has already transplanted a controversial mythology into a local cultural landscape populated by recognizable social and historical figures.

Direct depictions of sexuality would not only alter the film's register; they would likely invite censorship and overwhelm the symbolic architecture the narrative is trying to build.

So the film searches for another language.

And the clue arrives before the story even begins.

Embedded within the opening credits is a quotation from Lalon Shah. At first glance, the reference appears cultural, even decorative. It is neither. Lalon provides the philosophical framework through which the film translates sexuality into something larger.

The key concept is body philosophy.

Within the Baul tradition associated with Lalon, the body is a spiritual laboratory. Biological processes become metaphors for inner transformation. Desire, reproduction, and physical energy are all reinterpreted as stages within a mystical discipline.

One image appears repeatedly in Lalon's songs: the fruit of the palmyra tree.

The metaphor is striking because it depends on a paradox. A ripe palmyra fruit naturally falls downward. Gravity demands it. Nature expects it. Yet Baul practice insists on the opposite movement. What falls must be raised. What descends must ascend.

In esoteric Baul thought, the fruit symbolizes a latent spiritual force residing within the body. Some interpretations associate it with divine love; others connect it to semen, life-energy, or the dormant supreme self.

Whatever terminology one prefers, the principle remains the same: spiritual realization requires reversing the ordinary direction of this force.

Lalon calls this ulto sadhana…reverse practice.

The goal is retention. Not expenditure but preservation. The practitioner must prevent the vital essence from dissipating and instead elevate it upward through the body's central channel toward higher states of consciousness. Failure results in spiritual depletion. Success opens the possibility of transcendence.

One of Lalon's verses captures the idea with characteristic elegance:

Saint's grand marketplace-house,
There stands a single palmyra tree upright.
Hold that fruit upside down and reverse it,
It has neither branches nor leaves.

The imagery is deceptively simple. The upright tree represents the body's central axis, the hidden architecture of spiritual life. To invert the fruit is to reject the ordinary logic of the world. The mystic moves against the current of nature, transforming descent into ascent.

And because this process unfolds entirely within the body, the tree possesses neither branches nor leaves. Nothing visible announces its existence.

At this point, Lalon's presence in Roid begins to look like a conceptual bridge. The film is no longer concerned only with sexuality as conflict. It is exploring what happens when desire itself becomes a site of reversal—when biological impulse, social expectation, and spiritual aspiration collide within the same body.

That concern, significantly, echoes the structure of the film's larger project.

Just as Lilith's mythology is rewritten through inversion, the Baul tradition imagines enlightenment through reversal. In both systems, the path forward requires moving against the direction one is expected to take.

The return

At this point, Roid begins to fuse two symbolic systems that, at first glance, seem unrelated. The forbidden fruit of Abrahamic mythology and the palmyra fruit of Baul body philosophy are folded into a single imaginative framework. Sumon's project is not merely adaptation but synthesis.

He takes symbols from different traditions and forces them to inhabit the same narrative space.

Within that hybrid world, the palmyra fruit becomes the mechanism of return.

If the film is indeed reimagining Lilith, then her deepest desire is not vengeance but re-entry. She wants another chance at domestic life. Again and again, she feeds Shadu cakes made from palmyra fruit. He consumes them eagerly. And with every act of consumption, his life moves closer to catastrophe.

The symbolism is difficult to ignore. Earlier, when Shadu abandoned her, he had not yet tasted the fruit itself. What he had consumed was tari—fermented palm sap. The distinction matters. Both the intoxicating liquor and the sacred fruit emerge from the same tree.

Whether his abandonment stems from an inability to live with her instability or from the distortions of intoxication, the source remains connected to the same symbolic object.

The tree is already present before the fruit appears.

Convinced that her curse has somehow been lifted, Lilith violates another rule. Traditionally, she belongs to darkness. Yet she returns openly, in daylight. She announces that she has changed, that her mind is now settled, that she is ready to begin again.

But the promised restoration quickly collapses.

The fruit that seemed capable of healing becomes inseparable from destruction. A cow is stolen. A child is injured. Livestock die. Eventually, fire consumes the household itself. The return that was supposed to repair the world instead reproduces the logic of the curse.

Yet the film refuses to portray Shadu as a victim seeking escape.

What is striking is not his suffering but his loyalty. Throughout the narrative he endures humiliation with almost unsettling patience. She insults him, disrupts his sleep, subjects him to petty cruelties, and repeatedly tests his devotion. Yet he never engages her in genuine confrontation.

Even at moments when anger would seem natural, he remains restrained. At a feast, he forgoes his own portion of meat so that he can carry it home for her. Later, when she disappears, he sets out in search of her.

His attachment borders on the devotional. And crucially, neither the forbidden fruit nor its palmyra counterpart is forced upon him. No serpent deceives him. No external power compels him. The choice remains his.

He consumes because he desires.

Somewhere within him exists a conviction—perhaps irrational, perhaps mystical—that the falling fruit heralds her return. The fruit becomes less an object than a promise.

When it falls again, it does so on a night of violent weather. Wind tears through the landscape. Rain overwhelms the darkness. The conditions feel mythic, as though the natural world itself is participating in the event.

And she returns.

This time, however, something has changed. Her memories have become fragmented. She no longer recognizes even the goat that once functioned as her closest companion. The past survives only in scattered traces. Having failed once, she approaches domestic life as though attempting to rebuild it from the beginning.

Then the film takes an even stranger turn.

Lilith is pregnant.

The problem is obvious. She has not slept with her husband. Nor has she reunited with the man who preceded him. The pregnancy appears without a biological explanation. The narrative suddenly enters the territory of miracle, myth, and symbol.

Here another buried layer of the Lilith tradition resurfaces.

In certain medieval retellings, Lilith returns not through ordinary intimacy but through the theft of Adam's generative power. Sumon appears to translate that mythology into a different symbolic language. The demonic figure associated with stolen seed begins to acquire characteristics more commonly associated with the Virgin Mary.

Lilith starts to resemble Mary.

The transformation is not presented through imagery. One of the film's most enigmatic sequences unfolds during another night of storm and turbulence. The house fills with animals of different species. Amid this improvised manger, Lilith and Shadu lie together on the floor.

At a certain moment, spatial relationships begin to dissolve. Sadu's body appears to diminish, drawing closer and closer to Lilith's womb until he resembles a fetus suspended within a maternal space.

The image collapses several identities into one another. Husband becomes child. Lover becomes offspring. The feared woman becomes mother.

Before following the implications of that transformation, it is worth pausing on a broader cultural pattern.

One of Freud's most influential ideas—the Madonna–Whore Complex—rests on a fundamental division. Men, Freud argued, often separate women into incompatible categories: the woman who can be desired and the woman who can be revered. Rarely both at once.

A similar observation appears in psychologist Barbara Black Koltuv's The Book of Lilith. Patriarchal cultures, she argues, have long organized female identity around a split symbolic structure. At one pole stands Lilith: unruly, threatening, sexually autonomous, and therefore feared. At the other stands Mary: pure, maternal, nurturing, and therefore sanctified.

The distance between those two figures is one of the oldest narratives in Western religious imagination.

What makes Roid intriguing is that it appears determined to erase that distance.

The unbroken curse

The tension between Lilith and Mary is not merely conceptual though. Religious art has often visualized it through a shared symbol.

In the mystical Jewish text Zohar, Lilith enters Eden in the guise of a serpent, becoming an agent of temptation and rupture. Centuries later, Catholic iconography would repeatedly stage the opposite image.

In Caravaggio's Madonna with the Serpent, Mary stands triumphant, crushing the serpent beneath her foot. The symbolism is unmistakable. One woman is associated with the Fall; the other with redemption. One embodies transgression; the other overcomes it.

Roid appears to move toward collapsing those categories. Yet at its decisive moments, it retreats.

Sadhu, for all his devotion, becomes increasingly obsessed with destroying the child growing inside Lilith. The village has already begun whispering. His vanished wife has returned pregnant. Explanations are impossible. Rumor rushes in to fill the void.

More revealing, however, is Lilith's own response. At one point she strikes her pregnant belly with a stone, attempting to terminate the pregnancy herself. Significantly, the act occurs at night. Darkness returns at precisely the moment when the old mythology resurfaces. Whatever transformation seemed possible begins to unravel.

The implication is difficult to avoid. Lilith may have returned, but she has not escaped the gravitational pull of her archetype. The curse remains intact.

And then she leaves again.

This departure is different from the others. She is neither exiled nor abandoned. No husband escorts her into the wilderness. No social force physically removes her. She walks away on her own terms.

The one left behind this time is Sadhu.

As the film moves toward its conclusion, his psychological deterioration accelerates. He wanders through the landscape carrying an artificial palmyra fruit, clinging to a symbol whose meaning has long since become unstable. When a Baul figure confronts him with the question of transgression, his certainty collapses entirely.

"Did I eat the forbidden fruit or not?"

The question is larger than it appears. By this stage, the fruit has ceased to function as a physical object. It has become an epistemological problem. Sadhu can no longer distinguish temptation from devotion, salvation from destruction, or love from obsession.

Around the same time, another strange detail emerges. Kulsum—the goat most closely associated with Lilith throughout the film—has given birth.

The symbolism invites interpretation. If the artificial fruit represents an attempt to reproduce what has been lost, then Kulsum begins to function as a surrogate presence, a displaced version of Lilith herself. Life continues, but only through substitution.

Sadhu responds with degeneration. He slaughters the goat.

The scene is among the film's most unsettling. The animal that once embodied nurture and continuity is reduced to flesh. He devours an entire pot of meat alone, consuming with the same excess that has defined his relationship to the fruit from the beginning. What began as desire has become appetite. What began as longing has become compulsion.

By now, Sadhu resembles the monster the narrative initially seemed prepared to locate elsewhere.

Yet he continues searching.

He gathers palmyra fruits obsessively, as though accumulation might restore what has vanished. The image grows increasingly absurd and increasingly tragic. Fruit piles upon fruit. Desire piles upon desire. Meaning disappears beneath repetition.

Eventually he finds himself buried beneath a mountain of them.

The symbolism is devastating. Earlier, the fruit represented possibility. Then temptation. Then return. By the end it signifies depletion. The tree has been stripped almost bare, and Sadhu appears to have exhausted whatever vital force once sustained him.

The final image completes the cycle. We hear Lilith's voice. A hand extends toward him from beyond the frame. In that hand rests another palmyra fruit.

The gesture is both invitation and sentence. The exchange that has governed the entire film is ready to begin again.

And it is here that my reservations begin.

Because if this reading is correct, the film ultimately arrives at a strangely conservative destination. Whether Lilith leaves Adam or finds another companion; whether she appears as lover, wife, mother, madwoman, or wanderer; whether she borrows traits from Mary or sheds them again—the underlying structure remains unchanged.

She is still the curse. She is still the source of disorder. She is still the figure through whom destruction enters the lives of men.

That outcome raises a question about the very idea of counter-mythology. If a narrative rewrites the circumstances of a myth but preserves its moral architecture intact, how radical is the revision? Hawa inverted the traditional hierarchy of victim and villain. Manasa emerged as the wounded figure; Chand Saudagar became the agent of injustice. The old story was not merely retold but rejudged.

Roid, by contrast, seems less willing to perform that second operation.

Its Lilith is relocated, localized, psychologized, and symbolically enriched. She is filtered through Baul philosophy, folded into Marian imagery, and woven into a distinctly Bengali landscape. Yet when the story reaches its conclusion, she remains trapped inside the role mythology assigned her centuries ago.

Which leaves me wondering whether the film's most interesting question is one it never fully confronts.

If Lilith is destined to remain the madwoman—if she must continue feeding Sadhu variations of the forbidden fruit, slowly colonizing his desires and drawing him toward ruin—then where, exactly, is the reversal?

If the demon survives every transformation unchanged, has the myth really been challenged at all, or merely translated into a new language?

The limits of the myth

The question, then, returns to where the myth itself began.

If Lilith's original rebellion emerged from a struggle over hierarchy—over who would occupy the dominant position within a sexual relationship—what happens when that struggle disappears?

What happens when the man she encounters is neither controlling nor authoritarian, but compliant, patient, even self-effacing? If Sadhu willingly submits to her will, then the foundational conflict that once drove Lilith from Eden no longer exists.

In that world, what remains of Lilith?

Would departure still be inevitable? Would exile still define her? Would she continue offering variations of the forbidden fruit, drawing her companion toward destruction? Or would an entirely different figure emerge from the collapse of the original antagonism?

Roid raises these questions but ultimately leaves them unanswered.

That omission matters because cinema, unlike certain other art forms, cannot survive on atmosphere alone. Music, painting, and literary prose often accommodate a degree of personal exhibitionism. Their pleasures can remain inseparable from the creator's sensibility.

One can lose oneself in a song without caring who wrote it, or stand before an abstract canvas without demanding a coherent argument from its creator.

Film is different. Film is a collaborative medium and a narrative medium. No matter how poetic its ambitions, it must eventually justify the movement of its story. Images, sound, performance, editing, and symbolism are not ends in themselves. They are instruments serving a larger dramatic structure.

Watching Roid, one sometimes senses a different priority at work.

The film has inspired a great deal of discussion about metaphors, symbols, coded references, and hidden meanings. Many viewers appear genuinely delighted by the discovery that cinema can function allegorically.

Sumon has undeniably built an elaborate symbolic architecture. Yet there are moments when the film seems less interested in communicating that architecture than in protecting it from comprehension.

The camera lingers on landscapes. Rain becomes a rhythmic presence. Music swells. Images accumulate. The screen begins to resemble a sequence of disconnected canvases rather than a continuously unfolding narrative.

The effect is seductive.

It also invites a particular kind of praise: admiration directed not at the work itself but at the intelligence presumed to lie behind it.

What a visionary. What a daring artist. What a remarkable director.

Such applause may be gratifying. But there is a point at which artistic self-consciousness becomes a limitation rather than a strength. When viewers become preoccupied with deciphering the creator instead of engaging with the story, the work risks turning inward.

That is why I ultimately regard Roid as an ambitious but amateur undertaking.

The achievement of constructing such an intricate symbolic framework should not be underestimated. The film's conceptual scaffolding is impressive. But a scaffold is not a building. Again and again, one encounters moments where narrative momentum should exist and finds only symbolic suggestions.

The film proposes more than it dramatizes. It hints more than it develops. As a result, its beauty often feels detached from conviction.

When the central premise remains unpersuasive, aesthetic sophistication can begin to resemble ornamentation—a patchwork assembled to conceal structural weaknesses beneath.

This assessment should not obscure the film's strengths.

Nazifa Tushi is exceptionally well cast. More importantly, she disappears into the role. Her speech, gestures, and physical presence feel entirely rooted in the world the film constructs. At no point does she seem like an urban actor performing rurality from a distance.

The language, particularly the film's use of regional slang and colloquial expression, gives the character a credibility that the surrounding symbolism occasionally lacks.

Yet even here, broader questions emerge.

Bangladeshi cinema has long possessed a tradition of representing lives at the social margins. Earlier generations associated such roles almost instinctively with Raisul Islam Asad in films such as Padma Nadir Majhi and Dukhai. Those works were frequently dismissed as "poverty porn" by critics uncomfortable with their depictions of deprivation.

Today, films like Roid circulate primarily through multiplex culture, attracting urban audiences eager for aesthetic experimentation. Whether the film will find the same reception in single-screen theaters across Bangladesh is another matter entirely.

One wonders what viewers outside metropolitan cultural circles will make of it. Is watching cattle plunge into rivers, observing people tend goats and cows, and contemplating long stretches of rural labor sufficient dramatic material for a feature film?

Perhaps. But only if those images are embedded within a compelling narrative framework.

Too often, Roid seems content to substitute texture for storytelling.

The problem becomes particularly visible because the film places enormous weight on only two central characters. Sustaining a two-hour narrative through such a narrow dramatic arrangement requires exceptional craftsmanship. The greatest chamber dramas achieve intensity through precision, extracting conflict, revelation, and transformation from minimal resources.

Roid rarely reaches that level of control.

Instead, it repeatedly turns toward visual spectacle…not spectacle in the commercial sense, but a kind of symbolic illumination. Images flash, resonate, and accumulate significance. One begins to feel less as though one is watching a story unfold than witnessing an extended aesthetic performance.

The comparison that comes to mind is Maqbool Fida Husain's Gaja Gamini. That film emerged from Husain's fascination with Madhuri Dixit and ultimately functioned less as cinema than as moving visual art. Audiences approached it as they might approach a gallery exhibition: admiring individual compositions while suspending conventional expectations of narrative coherence.

Something similar happens here.

Roid often feels like a solitary artist working through a private obsession. The experience resembles hearing a violinist play alone after midnight—not performing for an audience so much as surrendering to an internal rhythm. In such moments, argument matters less than mood, thesis less than texture, conclusion less than sensation.

And perhaps that is the film's greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness.

One leaves not persuaded but haunted. Not convinced, but intrigued. Not satisfied, yet unable to forget.

Listening to that distant violin, I find myself left with only a few lines:

Roid does not rise; awareness does not sweat.
Poetry ferments into exhausted myth and metaphor.
Yet still you remain strangely poetic in your demonic form—
Alas, Lilith. Alas, Lilith.

—

Mahfuz Siddique Himalay is a writer

(Translated from Bangla by Faisal Mahmud)