Beyond Varanasi: World Cinema’s Fascination with Time-Travel, Mythology and Divinity

For decades, filmmakers outside the mainstream Hollywood circuit have been obsessed with three intertwined ideas: the possibility of moving through time, the enduring power of ancient myths, and the slippery nature of godhood itself. Long before Marvel made time-heist blockbusters fashionable, world cinema was already bending chronology, resurrecting gods, and asking uncomfortable questions about human divinity. With Mahesh Babu s much-anticipated Varanasi promising to weave time-travel, Hindu mythology and the idea of divine intervention into a single narrative thread, it s the perfect moment to look back at some movies that walked the same tightrope. 1. The Fountain (2006) – USA Canada (Darren Aronofsky) The film borrows freely from the Popol Vuh, the Kabbalah and Buddhist notions of impermanence, finally arriving at a Hindu-like acceptance of Shiva s dance of creation and destruction. Visually and philosophically, it is one of the boldest attempts to marry science-fiction time-travel with spiritual mythology. 2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) – Thailand This film dissolves the boundary between past, present and afterlife. A dying man is visited by the ghost of his dead wife and his long-lost son (now a monkey spirit with glowing red eyes). Reincarnation here is treated as casually as changing clothes. Time is fluid, memory is porous, and the jungle itself seems to remember every life that ever passed through it. The film draws on Thai animist beliefs and Buddhist cosmology, yet never explains – it simply lets you inhabit a world where gods, ghosts and humans share the same dinner table. 3. Hard to Be a God (2013) – Russia This film is set on a medieval planet. Scientists from Earth live among the locals as gods but are forbidden to interfere. What begins as a sci-fi premise slowly morphs into a grotesque Passion play: the observer becomes the crucified. German asks whether divinity is a privilege or a curse, and whether witnessing endless human cruelty without acting makes one complicit. 4. Annihilation of Caste Sequences in Kantara (2022) amp; Other Recent Indian Experiments Rishab Shetty s Kantara fused the Bhuta Kola spirit-possession rituals of coastal Karnataka with a modern ecological revenge drama. The climax literally has a man transform into Varaha Panjurli Daiva. Similarly, Kalki 2898 AD (2024) threw Ashwatthama, Bhairava and a futuristic Mahabharata into a blender. Also Read : Akhanda 2: Jajikaya Jajikaya to be launched on November 18th Audience are going to find my character in 12A Railway Colony memorable: Kamakshi Bhaskarla