It is enough to make you scream
PARI Direction: Prosit Roy Actors: Anushka Sharma, Parambrata Chatterjee Rating:
In the middle of a downpour, a car speeding through a jungle hits something with a loud thud. The driver stays inside; a passenger emerges and finds they’ve hit a gypsy woman. They are now part of her grim story. Sadly, these first fifteen minutes are the only ones that make sense.
Pari comes with a tagline that says ‘Not a fairytale’. It should have said, ‘Not a clue’.
What begins as a captivat- ing mystery around a chained woman, slips into a tale of disturbed TV signals and flickering lights. Topped by the tackiest horror flick clichés — blurry creatures scampering past in the background; a screechy, bangy background score; splashes of red in darkened frames.
It’s confounding why Anushka Sharma would sign — and produce — a film that is essentially a meaningless maze of ghosts, ghouls and djinns.
To give credit where it is due, Pari spreads its canvas effortlessly from Kolkata to Barackpur to Dhaka. You meet Ifrit, the most powerful djinn, and discover how desperate he is to further his bloodline. You meet a cult determined to prevent this.
But then suddenly there’s a man nicknamed Professor (Rajat Kapoor), who leads a band of chainsaw-wielding men. And Ifrit’s bloodthirsty daughter, Peri aka Pari. Anushka’s Rukhsana apparently represents the Satan living in all of us. Even amid this mess of a screenplay, her energy makes things bearable. There is a side-track involving Parambrata Chatterjee and debutant Ritabhari Chakraborty to develop further on the idea of inner demons; there’s slasher chainsaw action and plenty of blood. The climactic resolution is as confounding as it is illogical — worsened by attempts to explain all the major plot points from the second half of the film.
Jishnu Bhattacharjee’s cinematography is innovative, but nothing can save plotless Pari.
At a total runtime of 136 minutes, it’s enough to make you scream, and not in a good way.