The film is a mythological horror-thriller centered on a mother’s anxious attempt to protect her child from the terror of an unknown, ancient evil. The horror is set in a mythical past in an unnamed and timeless Bengal village. The schoolteacher’s(kajol) beliefs about a curse from centuries ago, or a moribund goddess, disconnected any sympathy for the villagers’ plight. She’s unaccepting of her child’s terrifying phenomena and unexplainable illness, and endeavors to dismiss her child’s experience, speaking to her daughter normally with skepticism. The film reveals​​ the troubling nature of her new village life, in a patchwork narrative quilt of ritual sacrifices, buried guilt, and female divinity, gagged by patriarchal anxiety. Maa takes the audience from emotional suspense to believing mother, to channeling a divine sense of justice.