Review: Technicolour Lovers: Reel 1

Vinnie C
Aug 3
4 min read

by Vinnie C.

There’s a point somewhere in the middle of Technicolour Lovers: Reel 1 when the narrative stops feeling like a comic and starts feeling like a hallucination. Whether that’s a compliment or a caution sign depends entirely on what kind of reader you are. If you enjoy your horror spoon-fed, in tidy little bites, orderly panels, clear timelines, sanitized scares, look away now.

Then again, even those folks will find their cravings momentarily met. Every now and then a box pops up with something like “You feel a looming sense of fear,” speedrunning the emotion instead of letting it bloom. It’s like the comic gets tired of waiting for you to catch up and just yells, “Be scared, dammit.” But if you’re the sort who enjoys losing track of time in a fever dream of corrupted folklore, spiraling psychosis, and sociopolitical rot, then welcome to Arakkan. You won’t be leaving the same.

The art and paneling, too, play into this descent. It’s overwhelming, both at first and frankly throughout. The structure is less traditional comic, more cursed textbook: one of those dense volumes where the page is split into two vertical columns and you can’t tell which side to read first. It’s disorienting, but deliberately so. Like the village, the comic isn’t interested in making your journey easy. I'm interested in making it immersive.

Set across multiple decades but anchored in a singularly cursed geography, Arakkan and its infamous Churuli woods, Technicolour Lovers is a brutal, ambitious undertaking. The comic opens with myth and rot, two things it wears proudly on its sleeve. This is a place where patriarchal lineages pass down ancestral rifles blessed by goddesses, where folklore isn’t just backdrop but bloodline. It’s dense. It’s deliberate. And it’s absolutely drowning in detail.

Much of that detail leans suspiciously male. Women appear almost exclusively as witches, seductresses, or spectral burdens. The first act of the “goddess” is seduction. The text doesn’t seem interested in resisting these tropes, yet. Whether that’s a deliberate critique or just embedded bias is a question we’ll have to carry into Reel 2. Eyebrows, consider yourselves raised.

And for the most part? It works. The comic’s voice is confident from panel one. not just in language, which is richly loaded and unapologetically ornate, but in how it withholds and reveals. The early pages feel like folklore etched into bark, passed through ghost stories and whispered warnings. There’s a real sense of place here. Of lineage. Of history dragging each character by the throat.

The horror is slow, but when it hits, it doesn’t flinch. Events don’t unfold so much as detonate. The spiral, a visual and thematic motif throughout, becomes more than just a symbol. It’s a trap. A way of thinking. A descent, yes, but also a loop. The kind you don’t realize you’re in until it’s too late.

Then comes the Bhagavathy Talkies sequence, and suddenly the comic takes a breath. The pacing drops, the dread loosens, and we’re handed a hefty dose of exposition. The ideas on the table are important,xenophobia, myth-making, cinema as statecraft, the weaponization of science, the slow bleed of ecological grief. And in theory, this is a welcome pivot. In practice? It’s a story pausing to clear its throat. What had thus far unfurled with haunted momentum starts explaining itself, over one very intense cup of Suleimani.

And it’s not that the conversation isn’t rich, it is. But the comic stutters under the weight of so many themes arriving at once. It goes from whispered terror to seminar break-out groups. Then, without warning, you’re hurled into a new scene altogether. Whether that sudden disorientation adds to the experience or fractures it depends on your tolerance for narrative whiplash.

Part of this lull is also thanks to Chandrabose, our grief-stricken protagonist. On paper, he’s magnetic, a government official turned broken father, driven by loss and something darker. But for a large chunk of the story, he doesn’t feel like a character so much as a listening device. He absorbs lore, witnesses horror, connects the dots, but his own emotional arc lands late and lands light. It’s functional, not felt. Like the story realized it needed a compass and hastily shoved one into his hands. There’s a version of Bose that tears through these pages, feral with grief and ruin. We catch flashes of him.

Still, even when the pacing sputters, the storytelling holds. Arakkan is not a place you visit; it’s a sickness that happens to you. There’s no exoticism here. No romanticism. Just rot, rituals, and the heavy, choking fog of history.

And then there’s Karuthamma, the forest’s phantom matriarch, its rumoured goddess, its chaos made flesh. Or almost. She hovers brilliantly over the text but never fully arrives. That ambiguity is deliberate, and often effective, but it sometimes leaves a vacuum where awe might’ve thundered. She’s more whispered prophecy than reckoning. More referenced than reckoned with. Which is why Reel 2 has my attention, will she become yet another female monster propped up by layers of passive sexism, or will she break the mold? I want to know if there’s substance beneath the silhouette.

The final act, though, brings it all back home. Madness is stitched back into flesh. Metaphor becomes body. The spiral tightens. Guilt, grief, myth, and memory collapse into each other. And suddenly we’re not watching a man search for answers, we

’re watching him realize that answers are the wrong question entirely. There’s no rescue here. Just the horror of being too late, and the brutality of knowing it.

Technicolour Lovers is a maximalist beast, dense, ambitious to a fault, and soaked in mood. It wants everything, everywhere, all at once. And while it occasionally buckles under its own weight, it never tries to be tidy. It bleeds into its mess. And in horror, that kind of unruliness isn’t a flaw. It’s the point.

If Reel 2 sharpens its pacing and lets its characters bleed a little more honestly, this thing won’t just spiral, it’ll fly.