Too hoary to curry favour
After successive stints as director of horror films like Ragini MMS 2, Alone and 1920 Evil returns, Bhushan Patel drives home that stale, unimpressive horror fixation with yet another haunted bungalow based horror tale. How much different can it be from the ones we have been subjected to over the years is a question you may well ask?
Not much if you go by what Bhushan Patel presents here. The storyline is a replication of the obvious. A young couple – a haunted Karan (Joshi) and an agnostic Ahana (Nargis) go for a holiday to Karan’s long abandoned palatial summer home and their lives turn into a nightmare.
Despite the psycho play on Karan’s haunted childhood (he goes berserk on hearing the sound of bells), there is a little here to keep you interested or engaged. Nargis and Joshi make a most unlikely couple and there is zero chemistry to make their relationship halfway fathomable.
Of course there is a crisis brewing and skeletons are about to tumble out of the cupboard along with a wispy womanly ghost and some ghastly edicts (something like Ghosts will visit you if you comb your hair at night) that cry out for sense. They are in London so Nargis’ fancy accent doesn’t sound out of place as much as Sachin’s desi (what amounts to a series of grunts and growls) routine does.
The story doesn’t have any teeth even with a murder happening in the past. The build-up of scares are more laughable than scary. The twists in the tale gets a little more vigorous in the second half but there is nothing in it to matter much. Special effects are rather ordinary here. There is a chill in the air but it has nothing to do with the scenic atmospherics or the cinematography and more to do with the dead beat disengagement between the two lead players. Mona Singh’s psychiatrist wears an ‘Om’ engraved in her hands to deter evil.
So even genuine science gets a trashing here. The para-normal becomes the para-ridiculous as the narrative plays along and the stock tropes get into the act while the actors shiver out a pointless rant. There is neither tension nor frights to jerk you out of the inertia brought on by this disappointingly vacant horror flick!