|
Release
date:
|
March 2, 2018
|
|
Director:
|
Prosit Roy
|
|
Cast:
Language:
|
Anushka Sharma,
Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Rajat Kapoor, Preeti Sharma, Ritabhari Chakraborty
Hindi
|
Two years in a row have brought
unexpected gifts from Indian cinema for the national masochists club. Last year
we heard of dybbuk and ruchim from Jewish folklore via the Mollywood production
Ezra. 2017 also gave us the Tamil venture Aval (simultaneously made
by the same director in Hindi as The House Next Door), which tapped into our anxieties
about what lies outside our windows in the still of the night. Now, in the
first quarter of 2018, has come the discovery of ifrit and peri from Middle
Eastern mythology courtesy Bollywood.
I learnt about these beings – the
former demonic, the latter more ambiguous, says the Goddess Google – as I sat
cowering in my seat with my scarf covering my mouth and nose and inching
towards my eyes throughout the press preview of the film Pari: Not A Fairytale last night.
Irrespective of what the rest of
this review says, know this: Pari is
scary as hell and heaven and every imaginable eerie space in between.
Director Prosit Roy’s
supernatural thriller stars Anushka Sharma as a mysterious creature of
preternatural origins and curious intentions. Her worldly name is Rukhsana, but
she appears to be not of this world. Why did her mother (played by Preeti
Sharma) keep her tied up in a hole in the woods and in a filthy condition no
beast deserves?
The question is answered, though
not entirely so, when Rukhsana latches on to a man called Arnab (Parambrata
Chattopadhyay), an employee at a printing press in Kolkata. Their connection is
that her mother dies in an accident involving his car.
Seeing the daughter’s pitiable
condition, Arnab decides to do what every regular follower of the horror genre
knows he should not: shelter her till he can make alternative arrangements.
Elsewhere in the region, a
one-eyed man (Rajat Kapoor) searches for Rukhsana, and a medical professional (Ritabhari
Chakraborty) wonders about the elusiveness of the fellow she loves.
Pari is not without its weaknesses.
Among other things, some of the information about Rukhsana’s background remains
fuzzy right till the end, and Kapoor’s character uses the words “pari” and
“peri” interchangeably but with different pronunciations within the span of two
sentences in one scene.
There is also a conversation
between Arnab and his fiancée that flirts with a needless intellectualisation
of the goings-on in the film. Fortunately, that exchange is so brief as to
barely matter. It is unnecessary anyway, since by then Pari is well on its way to fulfilling its goal of frightening the
living daylights out of the viewer.
This is not to say that Pari is unintelligent – no horror film
is, if it is effective in being terrifying. Writer-director Prosit Roy and his
co-writer Abhishek Banerjee are aware of the wave of Islamophobia sweeping
across today’s India, prevailing prejudices against spinsters and the
assumptions made about women who have undergone abortions. They use these to
raise our expectations in one direction while Pari heads off in another.
(Spoiler alert) The same tactic
is employed with the usual clichés that makers of fearfests tend to resort to.
When you are expecting a manipulative screeching sound in the background, it
does not come. When you are expecting an old man to repeat an action with a
glass eye, he does not. That first scene featuring that artificial appendage
and a cleansing routine sickened me because it felt gratuitous, but in the end,
when the eye came back to haunt us, I realised that the director was having a
spot of fun with us, knowing well that many Indian viewers tend to have low
expectations while watching home-grown paranormal films because our film
industries do not do the genre well.
In Pari’s bloodiest portion, while the colour red screams off the
screen, as disturbing as the visible gore is the expectation of how much more
we will see being spilled (but do not). (Spoiler alert ends)
The director’s job is made easier
by one of the best casts assembled for a spook flick. Anushka Sharma is the
perfect combination of innocent and enigmatic, frail and fearsome as Rukhsana.
She delivers an image-defying performance that is designed to elicit pity and
dread in equal measure, from the audience and from Arnab. The fact that the
star has chosen to produce this shockathon (she is one of the few female actors
in Bollywood to turn producer) speaks volumes about the risk-taking streak she
has brought to her career so far.
Parambrata Chattopadhyay’s
filmography is dominated by Bengali cinema. He made his Bollywood debut with an
endearing performance in the Vidya Balan-starrer Kahaani (2012) and brings the same quality to his well-meaning but
ultimately flawed Arnab.
These two central artistes have
solid backing from veteran Rajat Kapoor, who is utterly chilling, and his
shadowy gang, and from newcomers Preeti Sharma and Ritabhari Chakraborty.
Everything in Pari – from its art design to the
background score and sound design (refreshingly non-grating considering the
traditions of the genre in Bollywood), even the sketches accompanying the
credits – works towards sustaining our sense of foreboding about what is to
come in that next shot, around that next corner, behind that next door, beyond
that next street, after that final name rolls off the screen.
Greater clarity in Rukhsana’s
back story would
have helped, but for now, I am too busy trying to recover from that
petrifying passage in Pari when I
finally shut my eyes for a moment because I could take it no more.
Anushka Sharma, you sadist…!
Rating
(out of five stars): ***
|
CBFC Rating (India):
|
A
|
|
Running time:
|
137 minutes
|
This review was also published on Firstpost:
No comments:
Post a Comment