PEPPY PANEER
The thing with the supernatural as a genre in Bollywood is that the bar has been set rather low, and successes have been few and far-between.
Fittingly, then, when we come across a horror film that’s actually decent (still no star cast; this is indeed a genre that everyone but Emraan Hashmi has forsaken), it isn’t an original but a remake. The Hindi, 3D version shares its title and most of its plot points with a 2012 Tamil film that has, incidentally, already been remade in Bengali and Kannada.
Pizza delivery boy Kunal (Akshay Oberoi) has a wife (Parvathy Omanakuttan) who writes ghost stories for a living, but he doesn’t believe in ghosts. On a seemingly routine delivery, he is trapped inside a bungalow, where a sequence of supernatural occurrences unfolds. Yes, it’s a predictable enough premise for a horror film. But, provided you haven’t seen or read about the original, there are enough surprises in the horror-meets-psychological thriller story to keep things interesting.
More importantly, first-time director Akshay Akkineni manages to pull off something with which most other horror film-makers in Bollywood fumble — he ensures that at no point do production values suffer. And though he uses largely hackneyed set pieces to scare, he executes them well. Oberoi’s acting, if not outstanding, is convincing, while Omanakuttan switches from pretty to scary effectively. Rajesh Sharma delivers yet another fine cameo as the superstitious pizza shop owner. By Bollywood standards, this film easily outdoes most of what passes for horror. As pizzas go, this is Peppy Paneer. Far from authentic, but still enjoyable. movies@hindustantimes.com