“The gimmickery reminded me of Zee Horror Show”
Horror entered my life when I was 12 years old. Back then, it was a forbidden genre in our house. My grandmother felt watching ghosts could wreak havoc on my brain. There were many things wreaking havoc on my 12-year-old brain, and a ghost on television couldn’t possibly have made a difference. Or so I thought until one day my mother reluctantly agreed to watch Bees Saal
Baad (the 1962 Bollywood thriller) with me. The black-and-white macabre film, coupled with Lata Mangeshkar’s haunting rendition of Kahin Deep Jale Kahin Dil was enough to send a chill down my spine. What the film instilled in me, however, was an appetite for horror. As I aged, the cinephile in me signed a pact with the virtual devil — bring on the horror and I’d deal with it.
At age 12, Bees Saal Baad felt simple. Today, it feels simplistic. Horror genre is being reimagined in many popular as well as arthouse films. The idea of a ‘ghost’ is now used as a metaphor to comment on social and political milieus. Take, for instance, Get Out (coproduced by Jason Blum, who’s also backed
Ghoul), that gave the genre a gentle nudge by interweaving the narrative with racial politics. Horror, in films like Get Out, emerges as much from holding a mirror to society as it does from the menacing figures.
In that sense, the premise of Netflix’s
Ghoul holds promise. A totalitarian regime persecuting its citizens who are deemed ‘anti-national’ every time they challenge its authority; for those following a certain narrative of India, it’s a familiar world. But this is exactly where the series chooses to bid adieu to subversion to welcome the real star of the show (not Radhika Apte, but the titular ghoul) decides to become a regular horror show that makes you cringe.
The story revolves around a young military recruit who belongs to (what is suggested) a minority community. We know she is a loyalist when she turns in her father, who is in possession of ‘seditious’ literature, to the cops. Soon after, she is called to interrogate a dreaded terrorist who seems to know the deepest secrets of his interrogators’ lives. What sounds brilliant on paper becomes a caricature on the screen almost as soon as the titular ghoul reveals itself. From there on, the show bids farewell to subversion, instead opting for gimmickry and bloodbath that will remind you of Zee Horror Show.
The job of a horror film or a series is to bring its audiences to the edge of their seats. Ghoul fails to do so. The tropes are a little too familiar, except perhaps a scene where you’re left wondering which of the two bodies is now inhabited by the mythical monster. For a creature that many reviewers suggested was a metaphor for being a counter to majoritarianism, the ghoul feels like a Terminator from ancient times. The protagonists are equally robotic, often deprived of the layers of context that their characters demand (a top military officer is revealed to be a wife-beater and that’s all the back story that the script can afford him — heartless at work, heartless at home, hows and whys be damned). As a result, the ghoul as well as the humans feel robotic in their respective missions to annihilate.
After the first episode (of three), the show’s commitment to ‘subversion’ also feels half-hearted. Given that Ghoul flirts with the idea of holding a mirror to a society’s moral failings, it does very little to flesh out its main characters. For instance, the scene where Nida Rahim (Apte) gets her father arrested begged a few questions. At which point would someone like her choose conformity over her father’s defiance? What would have shaped her worldviews growing up in a totalitarian state? Most importantly, what exactly is her worldview? The show never spells it out, even though the real devil in the Ghoul would have been in these details.
Ghoul might have aspired to redefine the genre in Indian screens, but it did have templates to work with. Here, Apte’s character has been denied complexity. The examination of the monster within is as half-baked as that of the one outside.