‘Namaslay’ Review: Yoga Spin on ‘Suspiria’ Falls Just Short

Despite what David Ellison might have you believe, doors in Hollywood are not exactly flinging open for new talents. And that’s why filmmakers Rish Arhant-Sudhir and Kanish Arhant-Sudhir – also known as Rish and Kanish – have decided to bet on themselves. The duo’s debut feature, Namaslay, wants to use yoga as a cautionary tale for the dangers of cultural appropriation. And it works, surprisingly well, right up until it doesn’t.

After the death of her grandmother, Gayatri (Kiru Srikanth) decides to move from New Jersey to Los Angeles. California is a place of promise and inclusion, and the grieving thirtysomething is more than happy to celebrate new beginnings with her friend Judy (Angela Sant'Albano). So when Judy asks if she has any interest in rekindling her love of yoga – something Gayatri and her grandmother shared growing up – Gayatri quickly gives in. Why not take the opportunity to meet a few new people and build community on the West Coast?

That is, until studio owner Reyna (Christina Moore) makes Gayatri her personal project. Reyna’s yoga studio is an online sensation, but Reyna acknowledges that she needs more diversity among her instructors. When she learns that Gayatri has a background in yoga, Reyna convinces her new student to start training to lead classes herself. Gayatri is hesitant at first, but soon decides that she wants to rekindle a connection to her grandmother’s teachings and aggress to enter the instructor training program with Judy as her partner.

Over the coming weeks and months, the two collect their hours, finally graduating to become licensed instructors in their own right. But along the way, Gayatri begins to notice little frustrations and microaggressions between Reyna and her staff. It seems that this darling yoga studio may not be as perfect as it appears online, and it won’t be long before Gayatri finds herself facing something far more dangerous to her health than a hot yoga session.

For a film that opens with a printed definition of masala cinema, Namaslay spends its first hour as a fairly standard dramedy, following Gayatri and Judy as they integrate themselves into the yoga studio and its instructors. This is actually the stronger half of the film; we are treated to flashbacks of a young Gayatri rebelling against her grandmother as she navigates the traditions of two disparate societies. Namaslay offers up a series of cultural microaggressions, with the well-meaning but naive Judy often gravitating towards the parts of the studio that read at least authentic to Gayatri.

The film’s first-half also keeps the spotlight solidly on Moore’s performance as Reyna. Reyna feels like an easy character to play too broadly – in the wrong hands, her white savior complex could come across as cartoonish rather than dangerous – but Moore opens up the character to present a more insidious appropriation of yoga culture. She positions Reyna as someone who has no problem being inclusive as long as the hierarchy of inclusion keeps her positioned at the top. Her frequent self-corrections – one part performative empathy, one part unchecked anger – hint at a darkness only glimpsed behind the studio’s closed curtains.

There are moments, too, where Namaslay delivers on its promise of a kitchen sink approach. In one scene, Gayatri is pressured into taking ayahuasca, causing her to hallucinate a mountaintop dance number. It is the highlight of the film, a gorgeous blend of choreography and background effects that vaults Namaslay, at least temporarily, into the next tax bracket of film productions. Rish and Kanish also pepper their movie with the names of yoga positions, overlaying key scenes with title cards in both Tamil and English that give sequences an almost marquee-like effect.

I mean, killing a character and then pausing to flash “Corpse Pose” over their lifeless facedown body? That’s the kind of goodness you expect from a movie called Namaslay.

But here’s the harsh truth for the film: the margins in independent filmmaking are impossibly small, and if you misjudge what you can get done, things can go sideways in a hurry. Movies can survive a so-so performance or the occasional bad special effect; the secret for any good filmmaker is to lean into their strengths and away from their pain points. Namaslay spends most of the movie leaning into the relationship dynamics and the casual racism of influencer communities, and Rish and Kanish present enough talent on both sides of the camera to make it work. Then they swing from their heels for the big finale, and things fall apart.

Namaslay finally embraces its overt horror elements with a final showdown between Gayatri and the boss yoga instructor, but the filmmakers cannot quite bring their vision to life onscreen. Key visual effects underwhelm, and actors struggle to scale otherwise solid performances to the mythic levels of good and evil that the film requires. Namaslay has every intention in the world of blending Suspiria with South Asian folklore onscreen, but what works as a dark comedy never makes the leap to action-horror. The movie’s big finale is its low point, a kiss of death for a movie built on the promise that more is more.

That’s not a blanket condemnation. There are enough highlights here – the opening sequence and Christina Moore’s performance chief among them – to warrant taking your own chance on Namaslay. For those who find more awe than almost in the final sequence, Rish and Kanish’s debut feature may serve as a clever deconstruction of cultural appropriation perfect for a post-Get Out landscape. But for all its solid achievements, Namaslay is a film that can only get tantalizingly close to good without managing to bring the whole thing home. [2.5/5]