Mejbaur Rahman Sumon made his name with Hawa. With Roid, his second feature, he goes further back, not just in setting but in time itself. The film takes place in a rural Bangladesh stripped of all modern markers: no mobile phones, no dates, no historical cues.
The story centres on Sadhu, a quiet, middle-aged man living at the edge of his village, and the woman he has been made to marry by his master. She is volatile, unpredictable, and sexually withholding.
He is patient, then desperate, then broken. Around their house stands a palm tree, and its fruit hangs over the entire film like a question no one fully answers.
The air around them feels thick with something unspoken, not tension exactly, but the particular weight of a story that has been told before, many times, in many languages, and has never quite resolved.
On the surface, this reads like a rural drama, slow and atmospheric, rooted in the soil and silence of the Bengal countryside. But Roid is running a second story underneath, and once you see it, the first one never looks the same again.
Sadhu's wife defies him, refuses him, physically pushes him away, kicks him in the groin, and in that single act of refusal, a much older story cracks open.
In Jewish apocryphal tradition, Lilith was Adam's first companion, said to have been created from the same earth rather than from his rib.
She refused to lie beneath him during intercourse, arguing that they were made equal.
Adam complained to God. God sent three angels. Lilith refused to return. She walked out of Eden on her own terms, and the world that remained behind spent centuries making her pay for it, branding her a witch, a night demon, a killer of infants.
The Talmud codified this portrait in the starkest terms: Lilith as dangerous, seductive, irredeemably other. Her crime, at its core, was insisting on equality and leaving when it was denied. For that, she was not merely punished. She was rewritten, turned from a woman into a warning.
The woman in Roid does not leave but refuses in every other way available to her. And the village responds exactly as tradition demands. She is declared mad, cast out, called names that mean essentially the same thing Lilith's names meant across centuries and continents.
The film does not present her as saintly. She is difficult, erratic, sometimes frightening. But the film never lets you forget that difficult and unequal are two different things. Her refusal is not an illness. It is the one form of sovereignty she has left, and the world around her cannot forgive her for exercising it.
What makes the Lilith reading more unsettling than a straightforward Adam-and-Eve interpretation is the difference in stakes.
The story of Adam and Eve is about temptation. Lilith's story is about hierarchy. She was punished for wanting what she already had a right to. That distinction quietly changes what Roid is arguing.
This is not a film about desire going wrong. It is a film about what a community does to a woman who will not arrange herself into the shape it requires.
The village is not cruel in a cartoonish way. It is simply certain, and certainty, in this film, is the most dangerous thing of all.
The palm fruit sits at the centre of all this. Western iconography pictures Eden's forbidden fruit as an apple, though the original texts name nothing. Sumon replaces it with tal, the palm fruit native to this landscape, pulling the myth off the Mediterranean shelf and planting it in Bengali soil.
A story of a rebellious woman, forbidden fruit, and a text that condemned her, all folded into a single rural image, under a sky that does not particularly care who is right.
The film also carries other sacred stories. Sadhu's repeated attempts to leave his wife in remote places and her persistent return recall Abraham's abandonment of Hajar in the desert, abandonment framed as faith, distance as duty.
There is something of Rama's exile of Sita as well, a man sending a woman away not out of hatred but out of a confused allegiance to what his world expects. Roid does not dramatise these stories directly. It simply carries them, the way old soil carries old seeds.
Mostafizur Noor Imran's Sadhu is a man who has learned to take up very little space, careful, apologetic almost, like someone who has spent years trying not to disturb whatever fragile arrangement holds his life together. Watching that arrangement come apart is not dramatic in any conventional sense. It is quieter and worse than that.
Nazifa Tushi does something genuinely difficult with her role. She makes the character's chaos feel inhabited rather than performed, so that even when the woman's behaviour is most extreme, there is something behind it that resists easy judgment.
You cannot quite pity her. You cannot quite condemn her. She keeps you suspended between the two, which is exactly where the film needs you. Ahsabul Yamin Riad brings a loose, unguarded quality to his supporting role. He moves through the film's gravity without being crushed by it, and his scenes offer the kind of relief that makes the surrounding darkness press harder when he leaves.
Zoaher Musavvir's cinematography treats the Sreemangal landscape as a participant rather than a backdrop. Light moves through the frames the way meaning does, arriving before you have named it.
Sazal Alok's editing knows when silence is the point and when a scene has already said what it came to say. Rashed Sharif Shoaib's score does not illustrate emotion. It precedes it, lodging something in the chest before the image gives it a name.
Mejbaur Rahman Sumon has made a film about what happens to a woman who refuses. The village condemns her. History buries her. Myth turns her into a monster with a name no one speaks kindly of. Roid watches all of this without flinching.
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