Mayur Puri’s 2017 Firdaws asks its audience to think about not whether or not there is an afterlife but if we can actually stand it once we get there. In the film’s earliest moments we meet Affy, a suicide bomber who managed to complete his mission and is now in the afterlife. He wakes up in a beautiful cabin, surrounded by cushions, candles, a TV that plays his favorite cricket match, and a gorgeous woman. The woman, Noor, is everything he was ever promised in the afterlife: sexy and absolutely compliant. Even as he is fed grapes and promised fantastic sex for the rest of his life, however, he remains uneasy. He keeps on asking what happened to his leader, his team, and his mission.
Moreover, the room itself has an undercurrent of malice to it. Behind the frilly pillows and giant television, the walls are wallpapered with newspaper clippings that discuss the horrors of the real world (“40 Dead in Kashmir” and “Trump Deports Immigrants” were two of the headlines). Although Noor is doing her best to seduce him and make him comfortable, he becomes more and more agitated as he remembers the school children he blew up. And, with her last line, Noor even undermines the idea that he is in paradise at all.
This is not to say that the film is pulling the “Twilight Zone Switch” and Affy is actually in hell; rather, the movie undermines most religions ideas of paradise. In many beliefs, there is only one true religion. For a terrorist bomber, it is likely even more so. Additionally, paradise should give its subjects peace of mind, but this paradise doesn’t erase the traumatic memories of the past. Instead, Firdaws images an afterlife in which the frivolous and rather banal desires of humans don’t really make for pure bliss. In a rather funny moment, for example, Affy remarks on how white looking Noor is, and she responds, “Yeah, that’s what you like, right?”, which marks Affy’s ambiguous relationship to western cultural standards. Moreover, when he can’t have sex, Noor gives him a Viagra—which seems an absurd need in the afterlife. In essence, Affy is still fundamentally fully human. In this way, he is only a convergence of his past actions and memories. Even in the afterlife, he can’t shed his own human nature.