Hawa (2022) Review – Bangladesh’s Haunting Sea Tale That Sailed to the Oscars

★★★★☆ Our Rating: 7.5/10

Some films are set at sea. Hawa feels like it belongs to the sea — to its silences, its superstitions and its slow, indifferent cruelty. Directed by Mejbaur Rahman Sumon in his feature debut, this Bangladeshi mystery-drama was released on 29 July 2022 and went on to become one of the most talked-about Bengali films of its year: a word-of-mouth hit at home, an international festival traveller, and Bangladesh’s official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards.

That is a lot of weight for a slow, strange film about eight fishermen and a woman pulled from the water in a net. Does Hawa deserve its reputation, or is it a beautiful mood piece with less underneath than its admirers claim? In this review we look at the story, the performances, the craft and the film’s remarkable journey, and give you our honest verdict.

Quick Facts: Hawa at a Glance

The Story: The Catch That Should Have Been Thrown Back (Spoiler-Free)

A fishing trawler out of Cox’s Bazar heads into the deep waters of the Bay of Bengal with a crew of eight men, led by the experienced and hard-edged Chan Majhi. These are working men on a working boat: they fish, they argue, they gamble, they worry about pirates and empty nets, and they speak to each other in the rough, profane shorthand of people who live cramped together for weeks at a time. The early part of the film is almost documentary in feel — nets, engines, weather, routine.

Then, on an ordinary haul, the net brings up something that is not a fish. It is a young woman, alive, tangled in the catch, with no explanation of how she came to be in the open sea. The crew pulls her aboard — and from that moment the voyage quietly goes wrong. Fish stop coming. Tempers fray. The men divide over the stranger: some are drawn to her, some grow convinced she is a curse, and old tensions within the crew begin to surface in dangerous ways. Superstition, desire and guilt start doing what the weather could not.

To say more would be to steal the film’s best pleasures, because Hawa is built like a folk tale and a mystery at once. It draws on Bengali mythology and the bede (river-gypsy) traditions, and it asks you to sit with ambiguity: is this woman a victim, a threat, an avenger, or something the sea sent to settle accounts the men themselves have forgotten? The title itself — Hawa means wind, or air — tells you the film’s method. Nothing here arrives with a bang. It drifts in, like weather.

Performances: An Ensemble Trapped Together

Chanchal Chowdhury as Chan Majhi anchors the film with the kind of performance that reminds you why he is considered one of the finest actors working in Bengali cinema. His boat captain is weathered, commanding and morally compromised in ways that reveal themselves gradually. Chowdhury does a great deal with stillness — a look held a second too long, authority quietly slipping — and he makes the captain’s deterioration feel earned rather than theatrical.

Nazifa Tushi as Gulti, the woman from the sea, has the hardest job in the film: she must hold the screen while saying very little, remaining readable and unreadable at the same time. She largely succeeds. There is a watchfulness to her performance that keeps every scene she is in slightly unstable — you are never fully sure whether to pity her or fear her, and that uncertainty is the film’s engine. It is a performance of presence rather than dialogue, and the camera trusts her with it.

Sariful Razz as Ibrahim, the younger fisherman whose connection with Gulti becomes the emotional thread of the second half, brings a softer, more romantic energy that plays well against the crew’s roughness. Around the three of them, the ensemble — including Nasir Uddin Khan as Nagu, Shohel Mondol as Urkes and Sumon Anowar as Eja — creates a convincing closed world of men who know each other too well. Not every crew member gets a full arc, and one or two exist mainly to raise the temperature, but as a collective they sell the claustrophobia completely.

Direction and Technical Craft

Sumon, who comes from a fine-arts background and also designed the film’s look, directs Hawa as an experience first and a plot second — he has said openly that he wanted to put audiences inside a different world for two hours rather than simply tell them a story. On the evidence here, he achieved it. Shooting a feature almost entirely on water, on a real working trawler, is a serious logistical gamble for a debut film with limited resources, and the gamble pays off in authenticity: the creak of the boat, the changing light on the Bay of Bengal, the endless horizon pressing in on eight men who cannot leave.

The cinematography by Kamrul Hasan Khosru and Tanveer Ahmed Shovon is the film’s greatest strength. The sea is filmed as beautiful and threatening in the same frame — silver dawns, black nights, fog that swallows the boat whole. Below deck, the camera stays close and the framing tightens as relations rot. The sound design deserves equal credit: wind, water, engine noise and silence are mixed into something close to a score of their own.

The honest criticism is pacing and clarity. At 130 minutes, the middle stretch drifts; the film’s commitment to mood over exposition means some viewers will feel it circling rather than advancing, and the mythology underneath the story is hinted at more than it is ever made legible. If you need your mysteries explained, Hawa will frustrate you. If you can accept it as a folk tale — where the meaning is in the feeling, not the footnotes — it casts a genuine spell.

Music and Background Score

The music, by Emon Chowdhury and Rashed Sharif Shoaib, is woven into the fabric of the boat rather than laid over it. One song in particular became a phenomenon in its own right: the gentle, melancholic “Shada Shada Kala Kala” turned into a huge viral hit in Bangladesh and West Bengal, sung in homes and on social media far beyond the film’s audience, and for many people it was their first door into Hawa. On screen it plays as something close to a sea-shanty of longing, and it fits the film perfectly. Elsewhere the score stays low and tidal — drones, sparse instrumentation, long stretches where only natural sound remains — which is exactly right for a film whose dread comes from atmosphere.

What Works and What Doesn’t

What we loved:

• Extraordinary sea cinematography and sound design — the Bay of Bengal becomes a character
• Chanchal Chowdhury’s controlled, quietly devastating lead performance
• A folk-tale atmosphere unlike anything else in recent Bangladeshi commercial cinema
• “Shada Shada Kala Kala” — a song that genuinely earns its place in the story

What could be better:

• The middle section drifts; the film could lose fifteen minutes without losing power
• The mythology is left so ambiguous that the climax divides audiences sharply
• Some crew members are thinly sketched and exist mainly as pressure valves

Box Office: A Sleeper Hit That Travelled the World

Reliable figures for Bangladeshi releases are harder to come by than for Hollywood or Bollywood, so a word of care is needed here. What is well supported is the shape of the story: Hawa opened modestly and then grew on exceptional word of mouth, running for months in Bangladeshi cinemas at a time when local films often vanished in a fortnight. A worldwide gross of around ৳16 crore (roughly US$1.6 million) is the figure most commonly reported against the film — a strong result for a slow, star-led-but-unconventional Bengali title, even if Bangladeshi box-office reporting is not independently audited the way major-market figures are.

The international run was, for a Bangladeshi film, remarkable. The film received an unusually wide North American release in September 2022, opening in dozens of theatres across the United States and Canada and reportedly placing inside the US box office top 30 in its opening frame — widely noted at the time as a first for a Bangladeshi film. Releases followed in India, including Kolkata in December 2022, and at festivals from South Asia to Japan. Bangladesh then selected it as the country’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards. It was not nominated, but for a debut feature shot on a fishing boat, the journey itself was the achievement.

Verdict: Should You Watch It?

Yes — if you have patience for atmosphere. Hawa is not an entertainment machine; it is a slow tide of a film, and viewers who need constant plot movement may find it tests them. But those who give themselves over to it get something genuinely rare: a Bengali folk mystery with world-class imagery, a superb central performance, and a sadness that stays with you after the boat comes home. It is flawed, deliberately unresolved, and absolutely worth seeing.

Our rating: 7.5/10 — a haunting, beautifully shot sea fable that announced a major new Bangladeshi filmmaker.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Hawa based on a true story?
No. It is an original story by Mejbaur Rahman Sumon, drawing on Bengali folk traditions, mythology and the real working lives of deep-sea fishermen from the Cox’s Bazar coast.

Was Hawa really Bangladesh’s Oscar entry?
Yes. It was Bangladesh’s official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards. It did not make the final nominations, but its selection — and its wide international release — was a milestone for Bangladeshi cinema.

What does the title Hawa mean?
Hawa is the Bengali word for wind or air. It fits the film’s approach: the threat in the story arrives invisibly and gradually, like a change in the weather.

What language is Hawa in, and are subtitles available?
The film is in Bengali, in the rough coastal dialect of its fisherman characters. International and streaming versions carry English subtitles.

Where can I watch Hawa?
The film came to streaming on Sony LIV after its theatrical run, and availability varies by region and over time, so check your local platforms and digital stores.