Name: Maa
Genre: Horror
Released: 2025-06-27

Question 1

What is the plot?

Jessica Chen · Accepted Answer

A Kali Puja takes place at night in the ancestral zamindar mansion in the fictional village of Chandrapur, West Bengal. Villagers gather beneath flickering lamps and incense smoke while the ceremony centers on a crude temple and a towering, gnarled banyan that looms behind the house. In the middle of the ritual, a woman in labor gives birth in a cramped room of the old family compound. The midwife declares the first newborn a son; moments later she announces that the mother has produced twins. The puja is led by an elderly woman who had reported a vision of the goddess. As attendants whisper and the priestess intones, the midwife reveals the second infant to be a girl. The scion of the zamindar family — a proud, young man who is the father — takes the newborn daughter from the exhausted mother despite her frantic protests. He carries the infant across the courtyard to the priestess who presides over the Kali rites. The priestess leads the congregation to an altar mounted on a rock in front of the great tree and draws a colossal brass-bladed sword. She lifts the blade and begins the motions of ritual sacrifice, then suddenly hesitates and tells the assembly that the goddess cannot demand the life of a baby girl. The young man named Joydev lunges forward, wrenching the sword from her hands. He declares that he alone has the right to make the offering, raises the sword over the infant, and slashes down; the girl dies beneath the blade.

Forty years later, in Kolkata, Ambika and her husband Shubankar raise their twelve-year-old daughter, Shweta, in a tidy apartment. Shubankar carries, in private, the weight of the past: he is the same son born in Chandrapur on the night of the puja, and he has kept the secret of his twin sibling to himself. He debates when to tell Shweta the history of their land and legacy, yet avoids the subject. One day a messenger arrives from Chandrapur: Joydev, now an aged village sarpanch, comes in person to hand over a summons. Joydev tells Shubankar that his father has died. Shubankar stiffens; despite Ambika’s pleas and Shweta’s eager questions, he refuses to let their daughter visit the village for the funeral. He travels alone to Chandrapur to cremate his father and to manage the zamindar estate. While there he speaks with Joydev about property matters and tells him he intends to sell the ancestral home and lands.

Shubankar sets out to return to Kolkata by car. As his vehicle moves away from the compound and passes the grove dominated by the same ancient tree behind the mansion, a thin, jagged splinter from the tree’s exposed roots flies up, pierces the sole of his shoe and lodges into his foot. He is startled and grips the steering wheel, then notices smoke beginning to billow beneath the car. The splinter burns; a sudden, fierce flame flashes where the root lodged in his shoe and the upholstery begins to catch. Shubankar stops, tries to climb out, but the doors lock as heat surges through the cabin. Flames explode through the interior; he screams and bangs on the windows. The fire spreads too quickly. The car is consumed and Shubankar perishes in the inferno as the vehicle becomes a burning, twisted shell on the roadside. Word of the bizarre accident — a tree root splinter that ignited and annihilated the car — reaches Ambika in Kolkata.

Ambika and Shweta travel to Chandrapur to deal with the legal formalities of the estate sale and to mourn. They arrive at the creaking mansion that sits behind low walls and a rusted gate. An old caretaker and his family live in an adjacent building to the main house. The caretaker’s daughter, Deepika, meets Shweta and they strike up an immediate friendship. Shweta is curious about everything connected to the house; she insists she wants to see the massive banyan tree that stands like a sentinel behind the palace. Deepika initially refuses to go near the tree, citing local superstition and warnings from elders; later, she relents and accompanies Shweta despite cautionary murmurs from villagers who keep their distance.

As the two girls stand before the tree, Deepika suddenly feels pain and realizes she has had her first menstrual period. Ambika, who has followed them, pulls Shweta away and tends to Deepika. The villagers exchange uneasy looks. Within a few days, the community notes a pattern: several adolescent girls in the village disappear shortly after they experience their first menstruation. Each disappearance is followed, a short time later, by the girl’s unheralded return to the village. The returned girls appear physically unharmed, but in the days after their return they no longer have menstrual periods; doctors confirm that each girl has unexpectedly ceased menstruating. Rumors spread that a daitya — a demon — inhabits the tree and takes girls to it after their first blood. Ambika, shaken by Shubankar’s death and alarmed by the pattern among the village girls, decides she will not immediately sell the property and leave; she stays to uncover what is happening. Ambika requests help from a local police officer named Sarfaraz, who approaches the situation with skepticism toward supernatural explanations and insists on finding human causes for the abductions.

Ambika and Officer Sarfaraz interview families and examine the returned girls. They bring several of the girls to a local physician; the doctor examines each child and reports that none show any signs of physical assault, injury or violation. He records his astonishment that all the girls have ceased to menstruate. Meanwhile, an old servant of the zamindar household — the father of the present caretaker and one of the few men still alive who remembers the night of the twin infants — approaches Ambika with a ledger and a brittle, stitched manuscript that had belonged to Shubankar. The old man hands the manuscript to Ambika and asks her to read it. She sits beneath the eaves of the mansion’s verandah and studies the faded pages. The manuscript contains accounts of the household history and local lore: it documents a lineage of ritual offerings, pages of a Kali Puja recitation, and references to an ancient blood daitya called Aamsaja. The manuscript describes a curse linked to the tangled roots of the great tree, and it recounts how villagers once offered human sacrifices to satiate a malevolent presence. The writing insists that the being called Aamsaja resides in the tree and that he seeks to propagate his line through a human vessel.

Ambika reads that Aamsaja requires, to be reborn or to continue his bloodline, the womb of a human girl recently marked by menstruation; the being selects such girls, takes them to the tree, and returns them altered and sterile. The manuscript also singles out one girl as the primary target: Shweta. Ambika clamps the paper between trembling fingers and runs to find her daughter. She packs a small bag and attempts to flee Chandrapur with Shweta by train, seeking to outrun whatever hunted the girls. They board a morning train, but shadows slide across the windows and an overwhelming pressure does not let Ambika relax. The village’s missing girls do not fade from her thoughts. Before they can put distance between themselves and the house, horror intrudes: the daitya, using the girls he has taken and transformed as pliant instruments, seizes Shweta while Ambika watches helplessly. Villagers later describe a scene in which the girls ring around their target in a trance and the forest seems to swallow a child whole. Ambika fights to hold her daughter but is pulled away and violently separated. Shweta disappears into the grove, leaving Ambika frantic at the edge of the trees.

Ambika turns to Officer Sarfaraz for help. The officer investigates the disappearance’s recent pattern and re-examines witness statements. He traces a thread of evidence and questions Joydev, who has continued to occupy an influential position as sarpanch and ceremonial elder. Under sustained interrogation, Joydev’s composure cracks. He confesses partial knowledge of the rituals; as Sarfaraz presses, Joydev’s voice and manner begin to shift. In a confrontation at the mansion, Joydev declares that he is not merely a man who presides over the village; he reveals that he is the human vessel for the entity Aamsaja, the daitya the manuscript describes. Those gathered witness Joydev’s face and posture warp as the presence within him speaks; he asserts that he has served as Aamsaja’s earthly face for decades. Joydev demonstrates influence over those changed girls and over the tree’s roots. He taunts Ambika, telling her that the child he requires to complete his resurrection lives inside Shweta and that nothing will stop him from obtaining progeny.

That night, Ambika sleeps fitfully and dreams. In the dream she sees an apparition of the goddess Kali; the vision instructs her to open the locked temple inside the house and to conduct a Kali Puja there. In Chandrapur the little family shrine within the mansion has remained shut for years; local custom holds that the temple doors open only when someone in the village dreams of the goddess and is called to perform the rites. Ambika wakes, finds a key hidden beneath an altar cloth, and unlocks the temple door. She organizes the ritual in the dim sanctum: she lights lamps, arranges flowers, fetches the brass sword used in the old altar rites, and chants the invocations she reads from the manuscript. The locked temple’s ancient wooden doors groan on their hinges as she begins the puja. As she prays, she undergoes a physical transformation: her manner grows fierce, her voice changes into chanting that vibrates through the rafters, and she moves with a blade in a way she had never known. In the village people gather at the mansion or watch from the shadows, drawn by the feel of a confrontation.

Amsaja, through Joydev’s body, acts to thwart the ritual. The presence floods the compound with gusts of cold, and the altered girls come forward as a ring of living barriers, trying to prevent Ambika from reaching the tree. Amsaja confronts her in the courtyard beneath the banyan; Joydev’s human form snarls as the presence bulks into something larger. The girls who have been returned but changed stand around the tree, chanting in a cadence that chills the onlookers. Ambika presses forward with the sword and with the fury that the vision has instilled in her. A violent struggle erupts beneath the tree’s hanging roots: the changed girls lash out and drag at her skirts, trying to break her concentration, while branches whip and coil with a life of their own. The daemon leaps at Ambika through Joydev’s reanimated body, and for a time it seems the power inside the sarpanch will overwhelm her. The creature slams into her repeatedly and throws her to the stone altar. Amsaja nearly kills Ambika in the mêlée; he slashes at her, knocks her to the ground, and presses his weight to crush her chest.

Ambika rises with the sword. She engages the being in a series of blows beneath the glaring moon: she drives the blade through vines and into Joydev’s torso; she repeatedly strikes until the presence shrieks. The confrontation becomes a single, sustained act as Ambika channels every motion of the ritual into physical assault. With a final, forceful swing she severs the head and splits the chest of Joydev, the human vessel, and the demonic aspect that had inhabited him dissolves into a cloud of ash and light. Aamsaja’s hold over the girls breaks; they collapse, unconscious and weeping, and the tree’s branches slacken. Ambika stands over Joydev’s fallen body; blood and smoke mingle on the ground where the sarpanch’s corpse lies. The villagers watch in stunned silence as the old man who had once wielded the sacrificial blade lies motionless, his body mangled from the blows and the ritual’s fury.

After the battle the old priestess who had first presided over the puja forty years earlier steps forward. She calls Ambika to her side and asks for the blade. Ambika offers the sword with hands stained and shaking. The priestess examines Ambika’s face and then speaks: she tells Ambika that she faced the exact test the goddess had set for her — the trial to choose between the life of her child and the salvation of many. The priestess states bluntly that Shweta had indeed carried a child conceived with the daitya, and that the only way, according to their customs, to prevent the creature’s return would have been to offer the girl as a sacrifice. Ambika hears the words and moves as if to fulfill them. She takes Shweta in her arms, sure that she must kill her daughter to stop the birth. She raises the sword to the child’s throat, poised to end Shweta’s life.

At that instant the priestess reaches out and grasps Ambika’s wrist, halting her. The elder releases the truth she has kept: the embryo that once lived inside Shweta is no more. The priestess explains — with no flourish, only fact — that the daitya’s seed has been extinguished, that the fetus has ceased to exist. Ambika lowers the blade and collapses, sobbing and clutching her daughter. Men and women who had watched the violence begin to exhale as if releasing all the breath the night had held. Ambika kneels and cradles Shweta until dawn comes up over the mansion and the banyan’s shadow shortens.

In the aftermath the altered girls receive care. The doctor re-examines them and confirms they show no physical wound aside from exhaustion and psychological disturbance. The old servant who handed Ambika the manuscript gathers the remaining pages and locks them away. Villagers begin to repair the torn curtains and broken gate; some choose to leave the house and sell their cottages, others stay to rebuild routines. Ambika remains at the mansion for several days, bedding down near the temple, watching over Shweta as police files are written and as the district authorities record depositions about Joydev’s role in the disappearances. The body of Joydev is taken away after the villagers perform traditional rites for the dead; his corpse is cremated at the village pyre after the police release it to the family.

In the film’s final moments, dusk has fallen over the forest where the banyan tree once loomed. The courtyard shows the scars of the night’s violence: ash on stone, trampled grass, and a broken sword propped against the altar. Ambika, exhausted and hollowed, carries Shweta to the verandah and lays her beneath a hand-stitched quilt. The old priestess blesses them and walks away into the thin mist. The manuscript is burned on the altar and its smoke rises and disperses into the black sky.

During the end-credits sequence, a young man named Vanraj appears in the ashy remains of the grove. He wears a hooded sweatshirt, baggy pants and boots. He walks with slow, deliberate steps through the charred roots and blackened undergrowth. As he moves, he pauses, touches the scorched bark, and draws in what remains of the airborne ash. He seems to inhale the residue of power that once animated Aamsaja. Vanraj continues into the tangle of trees until his silhouette is swallowed by the woods and the credits finish their roll.

Question 2

What is the ending?

Jessica Chen · Accepted Answer

The movie *Maa* (2025) ends with Ambika, empowered by Goddess Kali, defeating the demon Aamsaja by ripping out his heart. Although the demon had already impregnated Ambika’s daughter Shweta, Ambika prepares to sacrifice her daughter to destroy the demon seed. At the last moment, Goddess Kali intervenes, eradicating the demon seed and granting liberation to the souls of all sacrificed infants, thus saving Shweta and ending the cycle of evil[1][2].

---

In the final sequence of *Maa*, Ambika is trying to return to Kolkata from the village of Chandarpur with her daughter Shweta after a series of terrifying events. The demon Aamsaja attempts to abduct Shweta, and during the struggle, Ambika is thrown out of the car, resulting in Shweta’s abduction. Ambika wakes up in a hut where she meets an old woman, who reveals the dark history of the village and the true villain behind the evil—Joydev, a man who had killed and sacrificed a newborn girl 40 years ago and has been serving the demon ever since[1][4].

Ambika learns that Joydev manipulated events to bring her and Shweta back to Chandarpur, fulfilling a promise to the demon to sacrifice another girl from his bloodline. To save her daughter, Ambika performs Kali Puja, seeking the blessings and power of Goddess Kali. In a climactic confrontation, Ambika fights the demon and Joydev, ultimately killing Joydev by ripping out his heart. However, the demon had already impregnated Shweta with its child[1][2][3].

Faced with this horrifying reality, Ambika prepares to sacrifice her daughter to destroy the demon seed. Just as she is about to do so, the old woman stops her and reveals that Goddess Kali, moved by Ambika’s selflessness, has intervened. The goddess eradicates the demon seed inside Shweta and grants *moksha* (liberation) to the souls of all the infants who had been sacrificed over the centuries. This act breaks the cycle of evil and saves Shweta from a cursed fate[1][2].

The fate of the main characters at the end is as follows:

- **Ambika**: Though she dies in the battle, she is reborn with the powers of Goddess Kali, symbolizing her transformation and victory over evil.
- **Shweta**: She is saved from the demon’s curse and the unborn demon child is destroyed, allowing her a normal life ahead.
- **Joydev**: He is killed by Ambika during the final confrontation.
- **The demon Aamsaja**: Defeated and destroyed by Ambika with the help of Goddess Kali’s power.

The ending also reveals a dark truth about the village’s history: male ancestors used the demon’s curse as an excuse for female infanticide rather than protecting the girls, contrasting with Ambika’s courageous fight to save her daughter[2][3].

Question 3

Is there a post-credit scene?

Jessica Chen · Accepted Answer

Yes, the 2025 movie *Maa* has a post-credit scene. In this scene, a man wearing a hoodie, played by R Madhavan, enters the haunted forest where the demon was defeated. He takes the ashes of the demon in his hand and then transforms into a demon himself. This scene hints at a continuation of the story, likely setting up the plot for the upcoming film *Shaitaan 2*[1][3][5].

Question 4

What is the nature and origin of the demon Amsaja in Maa (2025)?

Jessica Chen · Accepted Answer

Amsaja is a tree-dwelling demon who is the rebirth of the mythological Rakhtabeej, a demon whose blood drops spawn new monsters. In the film, Amsaja targets the daughter Shweta from the bloodline of the family, waiting for her to reach puberty to abduct her.

Question 5

How does Ambika transform in the film to confront the supernatural threat?

Jessica Chen · Accepted Answer

Ambika, the mother, transforms into the goddess Kali to battle the demon's curse. This transformation is both physical and spiritual, symbolizing a fierce maternal protector fighting against fear, blood, and betrayal.

Question 6

What role does the village Chandarpur and its traditions play in the story?

Jessica Chen · Accepted Answer

Chandarpur is a village with a dark tradition of killing newborn female babies to free themselves from a curse. The ancestral mansion and the village's paranormal atmosphere are central to the plot, with the villagers warning Ambika that her daughter Shweta is the demon's actual target.

Question 7

What happens to the character Deepika in the story?

Jessica Chen · Accepted Answer

Deepika is a friend of Shweta who visits an isolated spot behind the mansion with her. On the same night, Deepika disappears, taken by the evil force, which raises the stakes and confirms the supernatural danger in the village.

Question 8

What is revealed in the mid-credit scene about the demon and the nature of evil?

Jessica Chen · Accepted Answer

The mid-credit scene shows Vanraaj Kashyap from the 2024 film Shaitaan absorbing negative energy from the land where Amsaja's forest once existed. It suggests that evil like Amsaja is not completely eradicated and will keep returning as long as there are people who derive sadistic pleasure from others' misery, symbolizing the persistence of evil forces.

Question 9

Is this family friendly?

Jessica Chen · Accepted Answer

The 2025 film "Maa" is a horror-mythology drama that is not particularly family-friendly, especially for children or sensitive viewers. It contains supernatural horror elements, including a demon figure and mythological themes that may be unsettling. The film features suspense, some frightening scenes, and a supernatural entity portrayed with CGI, which some viewers found more disturbing than entertaining. The pacing is slow, and the horror elements are intended to create tension and fear, which might be upsetting for younger audiences or those sensitive to horror content[1][4].

Potentially objectionable or upsetting aspects include:

- Supernatural horror scenes involving demons and mythological monsters.
- Dark themes related to family secrets and ancestral curses.
- Some frightening visual effects and suspenseful moments.
- Emotional intensity related to a mother-daughter relationship under threat.

There is no indication of graphic violence or explicit content, but the horror and mythological themes make it unsuitable for young children or viewers who are sensitive to horror or supernatural content[1][4].

Maa (2025)

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