Written by: Noor Ul Ain
Posted on: January 14, 2019 | 
| 中文
Sami Khan as Asad
One can even gather from the trailer that Gumm (Lost), a thriller-drama from debutant directors Kanza Zia and Ammar Lasani, is the classic man-versus-wild story. The protagonist, later revealed to be Asad (Sami Khan), wakes up in a wreckage of a car with a broken leg and multiple wounds. Beside him lies the dead body of a man he doesn’t recognize, a bag full of millions in cash and a gun. Asad, due to an apparent loss of memory, does not know who he is or how he got here. Gumm’s primary plot line, hence, is the revelation of the character’s back story through a series of flashbacks, while in the current timeline he tries to survive the jungle he is stranded in.
As a recurrent anxiety in the psyche of humankind, tales of the struggle of humans abandoned in wilderness have permeated art forms since the beginning of time. Cinema, especially, has churned out many classics like Cast Away (2000), Life of Pi (2012) and The Revenant (2015). Another such film is Wrecked, a 2010 Adrien Brody film, that Gumm seems to borrow heavily from. By heavily, I mean that from the establishing shot to camera angles to small details, like the radio as a plot device or unexplained hallucinations of women and children, among other things, are taken straight from the plot of Wrecked.
While it is exciting to see this particular genre of survival-thriller film making its debut in Pakistan, it would have been far more impactful had it been original in its concept too. Zia and Lasani, who also co-wrote this film, do however change the plot by adding some elements of family drama to it. Much of this in encompassed in the flashbacks, showing the blooming romance between Dua (Shameen Khan) and Asad. Unfortunately, this results in the most awkward, badly acted and unnecessary segments of the film. The violent clash between the horrific current state of the protagonist versus the happy, song-filled flashbacks of his past life, could have added an interesting element of storytelling, had they been conceptualized better. What we have instead, is an incoherent identity crisis between the genres the film wants to identify with, as it fails to reach the balance required to employ this plot device.
However, perhaps the only truly unforgivable element in the film, are the mimetic songs that literally narrate the happenings of the flashbacks, as they unfold in an odd nursery rhyme-like fashion. It is so strange an occurrence, one may think it’s added as a joke, was it not for the sobriety of the situations. This may be second only to the horrific CGI that, thankfully, made very rare appearances throughout the film.
What Gumm gets right is the incredible score in the jungle scenes that offers a commendable mixture of suitable music, suspense and climatic finishes. It also pairs the score with aerial shots of the jungles surrounding, what appear to be, the Margalla Hills of Islamabad creating a mise en scene that heavily alludes to the feeling of horror and hopelessness of being lost. Adding to that, Sami Khan makes up for his terrible flashback scenes, by doing a good job at portraying the pain and anguish in his jungle scenes with minimal use of dialogue. Shamoon Abbasi, as Haider the Daggar, adds another layer of suspense and intrigue through his convincing portrayal of the antagonist.
Gumm works with a low budget and limited resources, to produce a promising entrant into the world of man-versus-wild films for Pakistan. However, it begs to be refined and reformed in multiple departments, starting from and ultimately relying on plot originality.
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