Tag Archives: 2 Stars

Movie Review: Son of Sardaar 2 (2025)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Son of Sardaar 2 on Netflix

Hidden within Son of Sardaar 2‘s overstuffed story are some wonderfully executed performances — but, boy, do you have to sort through a lot of cruft to find them.

The sequel to 2012’s enjoyable Son of Sardaar finds naive nice guy Jassi Singh Randhawa (Ajay Devgn) waiting in Punjab for his British visa to come through so he can join his wife of 11 years, Dimple (Neeru Bajwa). When he finally gets it and reunites with her in Scotland, she immediately asks for a divorce.

Elsewhere in Scotland, a band of Pakistani-British musicians — Rabia (Mrunal Thakur), her step-daughter Saba (Roshni Walia), Mehwish (Kubbra Sait), and transgender woman Gul (Deepak Dobriyal) — is in trouble. Their leader Danish (Chunky Panday) — who is Rabia’s husband and Saba’s father — took off with a Russian woman, forcing Rabia to take charge of the group.

A chance encounter between Rabia and Jassi proves beneficial for both of them, even if she does stab him in the hand with a fork when they meet. Rabia gives Jassi a place to stay in exchange for pretending to be her husband and Saba’s dad. See, Saba wants to marry her rich boyfriend Gogi (Sahil Mehta), but his strict father Raja (Ravi Kishan) insists on meeting Saba’s family first. Not only does Jassi have to pretend to be Saba’s dad but a former soldier as well, while the rest of the women pretend to be Indian, Hindu, and definitely not musicians.

These are already a lot of characters to keep track of, and it gets worse when Gogi’s family is introduced. There’s his mom Premlata (Ashwini Kalsekar), his uncles Tony (the late Mukul Dev in his final role) and Titu (Vindu Dara Singh), and his white step-grandmother Kim (Emma Kate Vansittart). The step-grandmother’s backstory brings several other characters into the mix, and Sanjay Mishra shows up with a bunch of sidekicks as well. Heck, the movie even starts with Jassi dancing with Dimple and their four children, but that turns out to be a dream and they don’t actually have kids. There are too many people as-is without introducing imaginary ones.

New characters are dropped into the film following abrupt cuts, and it takes a while to figure out how they connect to the main story. Subplots sprawl and expand while previously introduced characters get less and less to do. The lack of focus forces the audience to keep track of threads and relationships when they should be allowed to sit back and laugh. Then again, there aren’t many standout bits, save one near the end involving Dimple.

Son of Sardaar 2 isn’t all bad, thanks to the actors. Devgn is still endearing as the innocent guy who stumbles into trouble. Thakur’s feisty energy pairs well opposite Devgn and keeps the story moving. Sait plays her musician character as charmingly caffeinated, and Kishan’s straitlaced performance as the strict dad defines the stakes for Jassi and crew.

The delightful surprise of the film is Dobriyal’s portrayal of Gul. Dobriyal is a tremendous actor with plenty of stellar work on his resume, but the fact that he brings such gravity and tenderness to a character in a rather silly comedy is impressive. Gul is the voice of reason and authority when things get too chaotic. I can’t speak to the authenticity of the way she’s written as a trans woman (there’s some dialogue about the man inside her versus the woman inside her that feels odd), but Dobriyal plays her respectfully. Her being trans fuels some jokes, but she is never the butt of the joke. Dobriyal won’t let her be.

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Movie Review: Sitaare Zameen Par (2025)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Sitaare Zameen Par is available for rent on YouTube

Aamir Khan’s sports comedy Sitaare Zameen Par (“Stars on Earth“) fits as a spiritual successor to his 2007 educational drama Taare Zameen Par. Both films aim to teach their audience about disabilities, and both do so in a heavy-handed way that focuses too much on Khan’s character.

This time, Khan plays Gulshan Arora, an assistant coach for Delhi’s professional men’s basketball team. Head coach Paswan Ji (Deepraj Rana) doesn’t like Gulshan’s know-it-all attitude and teases him for being short. More accurately, Paswan Ji says that if Gulshan is such a basketball expert, why doesn’t he jump and touch the 10-foot-high rim. People nearby laugh, as if this isn’t a) a stupid way to judge basketball knowledge, b) a feat even some pro players can’t accomplish, and c) definitely something most 60-year-olds (like Khan) can’t do.

Gulshan punches the head coach and gets fired. Then he gets drunk and hits a police car while driving home. A judge gives Gulshan a choice: go to prison, or coach a team of special needs adults. He chooses the latter.

For his community service, Gulshan is tasked with training about a dozen players at a recreation center for adults with intellectual disabilities and neurodevelopmental conditions like Down syndrome and autism. Community center director Kartar Paaji (Gurpal Singh) tells Gulshan to act like he’s coaching a bunch of 8-year-olds.

I am not the intended audience for this film, nor is anybody residing in the United States or anywhere with an established special education system. Sitaare Zameen Par is aimed at people with very minimal understanding of disabilities. As a result, the tone and terms used to address the players is overly paternalistic. They’re talked about as children despite some being men in their 30s with jobs and girlfriends. Some of this tone is meant to demonstrate Gulshan’s own lack of understanding, but the screenplay takes it too far.

This paternalism is further demonstrated by a subplot involving Gulshan’s estranged wife, Suneeta (Genelia D’Souza in an entertaining performance). She wants kids, and Gulshan doesn’t, lest he turn out like his own absent father. Coaching the team helps allay Gulshan’s worries about parenthood, but the fact remains: he’s coaching adults, not children.

It’s not as if Sitaare Zameen Par lacks the time for nuance. Its 158-minute runtime is about 58 minutes too long as is, given how much it belabors the points it’s trying to make. Gulshan’s character development is so slow that, even in the climactic basketball game, he is surprised by how his players react to the outcome. We’ve spent two-and-a-half hours learning about these men and their feelings. What was Gulshan doing that whole time?

To be fair, it is hugely significant that the players are performed by actors with intellectual disabilities rather than neurotypical actors feigning disabilities. The players really are the best part of the film, and their charming characters are all well-acted.

That’s why the narrative focus on Gulshan’s sluggish personal growth is so underwhelming. It doesn’t help that, besides being ableist at the beginning, he’s also racist. When complaining that he can’t refer to the disabled players as “mad/crazy,” he laments that society tells him, “Don’t call a blackie ‘blackie.’ Don’t call a chinky ‘chinky.'” His subplot with his wife is silly, too, because he treats her horribly. Why are we supposed to want them to work out their issues? Suneeta deserves better.

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Movie Review: The Bhootnii (2025)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch The Bhootnii on ZEE5

The horror-comedy The Bhootnii (“The Ghostess“) is neither scary nor funny. It’s not entertaining enough to spark delight nor offensive enough to spark outrage. It exists.

Writer-director Sidhaant Sachdev’s story takes place on the campus of fictional St. Vincent’s College in Delhi as a convenient means of sequestering the characters to just a few locations. There’s a school legend that involves praying to the campus’s “Virgin Tree.” I’m not sure if the praying humans are the virgins or the tree is a virgin, or how one would even determine that.

Every year, students hold a festival on Valentine’s Day in hopes that prayers to the Virgin Tree will grant them true love. The tradition continues despite a terrible fire that destroyed the festival in 2003, but several suspicious deaths in the years since have birthed rumors that a ghost haunts the festival.

The night before Valentine’s Day in 2025, the woman that Shantanu (Sunny Singh) is smitten with ditches him for another man. Desperate and drunk, Shantanu begs the tree for true love. The next day, his bubbly friend Ananya (Palak Tiwari) returns from a 6-month study abroad program. Shantanu and his superstitious roommates Nasir (Aasif Khan) and Sahil (Nikunj Lotia) are suspicious of Ananya’s return, but their worries are misplaced. Ananya is not a ghost.

But Mohabbat (Mouni Roy) is — and she’s got her sights on Shantanu. She’s a spirit attached to the tree Shantanu drunkenly prayed to, and she’s here to fulfill his wish. Her name even means “love.”

Shantanu quickly falls for the beautiful ghost that only he can see. But Mohabbat isn’t taking chances, and she afflicts anyone who might interfere with her plans with seizures. The outbreak prompts the dean of the college to call in a former student for help: parapsychologist Krishna (Sanjay Dutt), who goes by the nickname “Baba,” because he earned two B.A. degrees.

To be clear, Baba isn’t an exorcist. He’s a man of science, and he’s found a way to use science to help him punch ghosts. 65-year-old Dutt’s action sequences are aided by some barely disguised harness work that is inadvertently funny, but the fight scenes are otherwise forgettable.

That’s the thing about The Bhootnii — there isn’t much memorable about it. Stuff happens in a mostly logical order, characters act more or less as expected. The funny bits fall flat, the dance sequences are forgettable. The acting is merely serviceable.

Mouni Roy is the exception. She showed her skill at playing a compelling villain in Brahmāstra, and she is even more effective at giving Mohabbat real depth. It would be a shame to see Roy pigeonholed into playing negative characters, but she’s better at it than most.

Still, Roy’s presence in the film is part of The Bhootnii‘s most distracting issue: casting. [This part of my review may count as a spoiler, so stop now if you’re planning to watch the film.]

Among the “present day” cast, only one actor — 24-year-old Tiwari, who looks much younger than her fellow performers — is anywhere close in age to an actual living-in-a-campus-dorm, full-time college student. Singh is 39, and Khan and Lotia are in their mid-30s as well. Mohabbat was a student when she died, but Roy is also 39. Baba attended the college in 2003, at which time Dutt would have been 43. If you’re not going to cast actors anywhere close to college-age, then don’t set the story on a campus.

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Movie Review: Ground Zero (2025)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Ground Zero on Amazon Prime

As with any movie inspired by true events, it’s hard to know how faithfully Ground Zero depicts Officer Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey’s pursuit of the terrorist known as Ghazi Baba. But if you handed the premise to anyone who’s skimmed a screenwriting book or two and considers themselves sufficiently ready for the big time, this is the movie they’d write. Ground Zero is as standard a terrorism thriller as it gets.

The story opens in Srinagar in Indian-administered Jammu & Kashmir. In August 2001, a Muslim terrorist persuades three teenage boys to take guns and kill one of the many heavily armed Indian soldiers stationed around town. A poster of Osama Bin Laden hangs on the wall, though the 9/11 attacks won’t happen for another month.

Two Indian soldiers — one Hindu, one Sikh — stand in the market talking about how excited they are for Eid. The movie wants you to know they are DEFINITELY NOT Islamophobic. A kindly Muslim vendor gives the automatic-weapon-toting Hindu soldier a chocolate in thanks for his hard work. The soldier donates to the local Eid fund in return. Moments later, one of the young men from the opening scene shoots and kills the soldier, disappearing into the crowded streets.

The murder is the work of the “Pistol Gang,” who’ve killed 70 soldiers in the span of a year. The head of the local Border Security Force (BSF) office says: “I want my best man here.” Cut to Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey (Emraan Hashmi) rescuing a shepherd boy while in the middle of a shootout with suspected terrorists.

Dubey returns to Srinagar and cracks part of the code that the terrorists use to coordinate their activities. But he mistakes the instructions for an attack on the government office in Srinagar, when the terrorists’ real target was the Indian Parliament in Delhi.

Federal agents arrive in Srinagar on the trail of one of the perpetrators of the Parliament attack, spouting cliched lines like, “We tracked him. We have to go now!” Dubey suggests not arresting, but following the suspect, in case there’s a link between the Delhi attack and the Pistol Gang. But the feds want to get their guy and beat a confession out of him. When Dubey protests, his commanding officer admonishes him with, “It’s an order.” This is first-draft dialogue, at best.

Hashmi is a charming actor and makes Dubey interesting. He’s especially good when Dubey is with his feisty wife Jaya (Sai Tamhankar) and their three kids. The family sequences are so enjoyable that it’s weird when Dubey acts recklessly enough to prompt his subordinates to exclaim, “It’s suicide!”

Dubey’s rashness dovetails with another Bollywood screenplay formula Ground Zero borrows heavily from: the rogue cop. Government bureaucracy and chains of command keep this one gifted officer from following his instincts and solving the case, as in so many Ajay Devgn and Salman Khan cop dramas before.

The difference with Dubey is that his superpower isn’t superhuman strength or indestructibility. It’s empathy. He wants to find Ghazi Baba with a minimum of bloodshed and intimidation because he knows that life in Srinagar isn’t easy for its residents. He tells a subordinate: “When a belly is empty, the brain can’t tell the difference between right and wrong.”

Dubey’s disciplined strategies and acknowledgement of local poverty give Ground Zero cover for evading the question of what role the soldiers’ presence plays in exacerbating tensions. There’s a scene where Dubey’s young daughter confesses to being afraid of the gun-toting soldier that accompanies her and the other BSF offspring to school, almost as if to suggest that only children fail to appreciate that the heavily armed soldiers are there for their benefit.

This is very much a film of its time for as broad an audience as possible, where good and bad are clearly delineated. There’s even a shot when the terrorists driving to Parliament hear a song with the lyrics “Vande Mataram” on the radio and immediately turn it off, just in case you doubted their badness.

To be clear, this movie is based on real events that resulted in many deaths, and the perpetrators were caught thanks to skill and heroism of the Border Security Force (Narendra Nath Dhar Dubey in particular). But Ground Zero tells the story in the most boilerplate, predictable manner. At the midpoint of the film, I made a list of six things I thought would happen in the second half (not knowing anything about the true story). I was right about five of them. Ground Zero feels like studio Excel Entertainment’s attempt to cash in on a trend. That doesn’t diminish the efforts of the real people involved in the story or tarnish anyone’s memory. I’d argue that they deserve a better movie.

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Movie Review: Chhorii 2 (2025)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Chhorii 2 on Amazon Prime

The followup to Amazon Prime Video’s 2021 folk horror flick Chhorii (“Girl“) doesn’t quite match the quality of the original. Chhorii 2 starts strong but meanders toward an unsatisfying conclusion.

Chhorii 2 takes place seven years after the events of the first film, which saw heavily pregnant Sakshi (Nushrratt Bharuccha) escape the clutches of her husband Rajbir (Saurabh Goyal) with the help of his former wife Rani (Pallavi Ajay). The two women now live together in a city, raising Rani’s daughter Ishani (Hardika Sharma) in a home owned by police inspector Samar (Gashmeer Mahajani).

Samar recounts the events of the first film and explains what happened immediately after. Rani and Sakshi walked to the police station where Samar worked. In order to protect Rani, Sakshi confessed to murdering Rajbir and his parents. When the women led Samar to the scene of the crime, the bodies were gone. Panicked Sakshi went into early labor, and Ishita was born. Samar’s sheltered them in his family home ever since.

One night, Ishita and Rani are kidnapped and taken to the fields surrounding Rajbir’s village. Sakshi and Samar follow, but Sakshi is nabbed, too, dragged into an underground complex of rooms accessible via wells in the field. The dry wells are evidence of the drought plaguing the village — a problem tribal leader Taau (Kuldeep Sareen) believes Ishita can fix.

The village worships an entity called Pradhan Ji that lives in a room at the bottom of one of the wells. He’s alternatively described as the deity responsible for the drought and the ancestor of the residents of the village, all of whom will die if Pradhan Ji does. The mythology at work is a little unclear. Taau’s solution is to get a new wife and servant for ancient Pradhan Ji, and Ishita is chosen even though she’s only seven years old.

The task of preparing the girl for the marriage ritual falls to Pradhan Ji’s current wife, Daasi Ma (Soha Ali Khan), whose very name means “servant.” In serving Pradhan Ji, Daasi Ma gained a few magical powers, including astral projection. Of course that comes at the expense of all of the other women and girls in the village, who live in subjugation to men if they aren’t killed right after birth.

The social justice message in Chhorii 2 is just as unmistakable as it was in Chhorii, yet writer-director Vishal Furia again closes his film with statistics about child marriage in India. If viewers can’t get the moral point from a story this unambiguous, they should stick to documentaries.

Even before the stats appear on screen, Chhorii 2 ends in disappointing fashion. In order to set up a third film — which is clearly Furia’s goal, even though one hasn’t been officially announced yet — Furia eschews a true cliffhanger and instead just cuts the story off mid-scene. It feels unfinished as-is, and it will be totally unsatisfying should a third film not materialize.

Chhorii 2 has the same creepy rural aesthetic that worked so well in the original movie, and the labyrinthine underground lair is unnerving. Sakshi’s navigation of the haunted maze is the film’s strongest sequence. The story becomes less compelling when it veers away from horror and into revenge territory. There’s little catharsis to be found when battling a misogynistic culture this violent.

Bharuccha again proves herself a capable lead performer. Khan doesn’t act with the same frequency she once did, so it’s fun to see her in this chilling role as the demonic bride. Little Hardika Sharma does a nice job, too.

Furia has built a compelling world for this franchise, and he’s taking a real gamble by not giving Chhorii 2 a distinct (if slightly ambiguous) ending. Here’s hoping it pays off and he gets to finish his story.

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Movie Review: Test (2025)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Test on Netflix

The Netflix Original Tamil movie Test has an identity problem. Trim 45 minutes, and you’ve got a taut thriller film. Add 90 minutes, and you get a dramatic series about complex characters. As it is, the movie is poorly paced and bloated with material that doesn’t square with the characters’ actions.

At the center of the story is Arjun (Siddharth), a professional cricketer whose career is coming to an end. He’s not ready for that, but he’s in a slump. The national team tries to force him into retirement just before a big match in Chennai against Pakistan, but Arjun leverages his stardom to buy time. Still, he knows this is likely his last hurrah.

Arjun doesn’t know who he is without cricket, but he’s got a life waiting for him in retirement. He and his wife Padma (Meera Jasmine) have an elementary-school-aged son Adi (Lirish Rahav) who’s desperate for his father’s attention.

When Adi struggles at school, it’s not his parents who comfort him but his teacher, Kumudha (Nayanthara). She’s a little too involved in her students’ lives, compensating for her struggle to have a baby of her own. She’s also a childhood friend of Arjun’s, though he ignores her.

While Kumudha focuses on her fertility issues, her husband Saravanan (R Madhavan) tries to find an investor for his hydrogen fuel cell invention. He’s been lying to Kumudha about having a job running a canteen, and now he’s in debt to loan sharks. If he could just secure a contract with the government, he believes all his problems would be solved — he can finally be the next Steve Jobs.

The three main characters have problems they’re trying to address individually, but it takes a very long time before the main conflict at the heart of the narrative is revealed. The inciting incident doesn’t happen until the movie is halfway over, at which point the tone shifts from low-key relationship drama into thriller territory.

Despite the long buildup, there’s little to justify why things happen the way they do. The marketing for Test bills it as a story about choices, but the choices the characters make don’t always follow from what we’ve been shown about them. I suppose the question producer-turned director S. Sashikanth is asking is what one would do when a golden opportunity presents itself. Based on what he’s shown of the characters, the answer is: not what the characters do.

For a movie with such an all-star cast, the acting is kind of flat. R Madhavan gets to chew some scenery, but it’s a long time before he does. Siddharth plays Arjun as so self-focused that he shuts out the audience as much as the people around him. Other than one tear-filled sequence, Nayanthara’s Kumudha is pretty one-note.

The standout performer is Meera Jasmine, who makes her return to Tamil cinema after more than a decade. She plays Padma as her family’s pillar of strength, the one holding everything and everyone together. It’s not a flashy performance, but it feels right for the character. Also, kudos to little Lirish Rahav, who plays Adi as a bit of a brat, but for understandable reasons.

Had Test been structured as a series, there would have been more time to show gradual character evolution — and to better integrate a subplot about the police following the loan sharks. On the flip side, shortening the film’s runtime would have added urgency to the story and made the stakes clearer earlier. As it is, Test is watchable but forgettable.

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Movie Review: Deva (2025)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Deva on Netflix

Director Rosshan Andrrews makes his Hindi-language debut with Deva, a remake of his 2013 Malayalam movie Mumbai Police. Screenwriting duo Bobby-Sanjay return to update their original script with a different climax, which feels hastily added and unsupported by the rest of the story.

Shahid Kapoor stars as Dev, Mumbai’s most notorious cop. I’m not sure how closely the new lead character hews to the one Prithviraj Sukumaran played in Mumbai Police, but Dev feels like he was pulled out of cold storage. He’s aggressively macho, breaks all the rules, yet is best friends with two upright fellow officers: Rohan (Pavail Gulati) and Farhan (Pravesh Rana), who’s also Dev’s brother-in-law.

The film opens with Dev getting in a motorcycle accident as he’s leaving a voicemail message for Farhan saying that he’s solved a notable murder case. The accident leaves Dev with amnesia, but Farhan chooses to keep that a secret. Dev’s the best cop there is, and Farhan trusts that Dev’s instincts will help him solve the case again, even if he’s starting from scratch.

The action flashes back to before the accident, as chain-smoking Dev roams about Mumbai smashing the heads of informants and drawing his gun on whomever he pleases. As long as Dev wears civilian attire when doing so, none of his superiors seem to care. It’s useful to have someone who doesn’t care about the rule of law to enforce the rules on others.

While the film gives a few nods to police brutality being undemocratic, it still celebrates its use. Dev always looks cool while beating the crap out of people, and the film’s action scenes are quite entertaining. But there’s something grim about Dev telling a crime boss, “Mumbai isn’t anyone’s kingdom. Mumbai belongs to the Mumbai police.” Not the citizens — the police.

Before Dev is able to confront the boss face to face, the police are repeatedly thwarted in the efforts to find him by a mole in their midst. Journalist Diya (Pooja Hegde) is eager to expose the mole’s identity. She takes his subterfuge personally, as her police constable father is injured in the effort to nab the boss. Her dad’s injury brings Diya and Dev closer together, and soon they are in love.

The intensity that Kapoor brings to his portrayal of Dev is one of the main reasons this movie works at all. He’s the right actor for the job, but there’s not much to Dev that we haven’t seen in other maverick cop characters before. Andrrews doesn’t provide us with any real critique of violent policing or aggressive masculinity, so the whole film feels a bit stale.

If there’s any revelation to be found in Deva, it’s the evocative, nuanced score from composer Jakes Bejoy. His only Hindi credit prior to this was 2020’s Durgamati. Here’s hoping that other Hindi filmmakers realize this composer’s potential to elevate even tired material.

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Movie Review: Devils Stay (2024)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Note: I sometimes branch out from reviewing Hindi films. The Korean horror movie Devils Stay opens in US theaters December 6, 2024.

Had the story of Devils Stay been told chronologically, it could have been a compelling examination of guilt and faith leading up to a climax with terrifying consequences. Instead, the asynchronous timeline hampers character development and fails to build tension.

Devils Stay — directed by Hyun Moon-seop — opens with a typical exorcism movie scene. Teenage girl Cha So-mi (Lee Re) is tied to the bed in a befouled room. Young priest Father Ban (Lee Min-ki) prays over So-mi, who levitates and screams for her dad’s help. Cha Seung-do (Park Shin-yang) breaks down the door to get to his daughter, just in time to watch her die.

A flashback shows So-mi and her father gazing at the stars atop the roof of the hospital where she is a heart patient and he works as a cardiac surgeon. He says that they’ve found a donor heart for her, promising her that everything will be all right after her surgery.

Back in the present, her family gathers at the funeral hall for the start of three days of mourning. A despondent Seung-do thinks he hears So-mi calling to him and sees apparitions of her, convincing him that she’s not really dead. Meanwhile, Father Ban worries that his exorcism was incomplete and that something evil still lurks within So-mi’s body.

One feature of South Korea that makes Devils Stay interesting is that hospitals often have their own funeral homes, usually in the basement near the morgue. That makes it convenient if, say, a heart surgeon who thinks his deceased daughter is secretly alive wants to grab her days-dead body and take it up to a surgical suite to apply the defibrillator pads one last time.

Other than the understandable sentiment of a father who lost his child and a priest who failed his parishioner, there are few emotional hooks in Devils Stay. There’s simply too much missing information to really become invested in the characters. We don’t know how much time elapsed between So-mi’s heart surgery and when she started exhibiting symptoms of possession. We don’t see her interact with her classmates, who appear in just one scene to say she wasn’t behaving like herself in school. We don’t know whose idea it was to summon the exorcist or what other interventions they tried first.

Father Ban has his own thin backstory that is shown in dramatic flashbacks that lack context. The particular dangers to him as an exorcist and the theological consequences of So-mi’s possession could have been more developed, rather than dismissed with an out-of-left-field explanation that’s merely an excuse to put Lee Min-ki into a fight scene.

The choppy timeline also makes it hard for any of the performances to stand out, since we don’t really get a sense of how the characters grow. Other characters like So-mi’s mom and younger brother are afterthoughts from a plot standpoint, and their mere existence doesn’t do enough to give shape to the world the three main characters inhabit.

Reorganizing the timeline and fleshing out some of the characters could have made Devils Stay feel more meaningful than it does in its current form. As it is, the film is more like a random collection of mandatory exorcist-movie scenes without a strong point of view.

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Movie Review: Munjya (2024)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Munjya on Hulu

Munjya is a nice-looking horror comedy that struggles with its central theme.

The story begins in 1952 in a village in Konkan. A young boy named Gotya (Ayush Ulagadde) is furious that the teenage girl he has a crush on is marrying someone else. He poisons the bride Munni’s fiancé and is publicly whipped by his parents for his destructive obsession. At night, Gotya takes his younger sister Gita (Khushi Hajare) to a sacred tree, intending to sacrifice her to a demon in exchange for Munni’s hand. But Gotya fatally injures himself, binding his spirit to the tree and becoming an evil spirit known as Munjya.

Generations later, timid hairdresser Bittu (Abhay Verma) suffers from frightening visions and hears Munjya’s voice. His mother Pammi (Mona Singh) and paternal grandmother Gita (Suhas Joshi) — the little sister from the intro — shielded him from the family’s sordid history and the role it played in his father’s death. Bittu learns the truth when the family returns to his father’s ancestral village, and he sets out to find the voice that calls to him.

Munjya — who is now a creepy blend of boy and tree — seizes the opportunity to escape, binding himself to Bittu. Death follows, and Munjya vows to kill everyone Bittu cares about in his quest to marry Munni. While Munni herself is now an old woman, her granddaughter Bela (Sharvari) — who happens to be Bittu’s childhood friend and unrequited crush — is her spitting image. Munjya decides he wants Bela instead.

The parallel’s between Munjya’s one-sided love and Bittu’s crush are obvious, but they don’t overlap enough to meaningfully support a theme. Bittu is never in any moral danger of his own preoccupation turning into a violent obsession, and Munjya is so single-minded that he never twists Bittu’s feelings to his own ends. There’s a late mention about mutual consent in relationships, but the idea is otherwise underdeveloped.

Instead, the story — directed by Aditya Sarpotdar and written by Niren Bhatt — treats Bittu’s cowardice as the flaw he must overcome. Yet Bittu is more shy than cowardly. Sure, he’d rather not upset his overbearing mother, and he hasn’t told Bela how he feels, but he’s otherwise pretty brave. He’s planning to study cosmetology in America by himself, and he seeks out Munjya all on his own.

If he’s afraid of Munjya, it’s with good reason. Munjya’s persistence and his capacity for violence are legitimately scary. While there aren’t many jump scares, imagining what it would be like to live harboring a killer demon is frightening enough.

Though billed as a horror comedy, the first 45 minutes are straight horror. Things lighten up a bit when Bittu enlists the help of his filmmaker friend Spielberg (Taranjot Singh), but by that point things are so grim that the balance feels off. The chaotic comic action sequence when the heroes confront Munjya is more tedious than humorous. There are a few very funny jokes, however, including the fraudulent faith-healer Padri’s (Sathyaraj) dubious story about the original vision for Indiana Jones.

An unfortunate side effect of Munjya‘s lackluster story is that none of the acting performances stand out. Everyone is adequate.

Given that the character Munjya is entirely computer generated, one of the big questions is: how does he look? Pretty terrific, actually. He’s substantial enough that his interactions with the characters and the environment feel believable. Munjya sets a new standard for the level of effects quality fans should expect from Hindi films going forward.

Overall, Munjya is a very good-looking movie. The seaside setting and gloomy forests are lovely in their own right. Nighttime shots are perfectly lit to set the mood without obscuring the action. The movie has all the style but needs more substance.

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Movie Review: Kaali Khuhi (2020)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Kaali Khuhi on Netflix

The Netflix Original horror film Kaali Khuhi (“The Black Well“) centers on a compelling theme but falls flat in its execution.

10-year-old Shivangi (Riva Arora, who was delightful as Young Supri in Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota) lives in the city with her dad Darshan (Satyadeep Mishra) and mom Priya (Sanjeeda Sheikh), who’s pregnant with a baby girl.

The family is called back to Darshan’s village because his mother (played by Leela Samson) is seriously ill. She was afflicted shortly after a tormented man opened up a sealed well outside of the village, letting something out.

When they arrive at the family home, Darshan’s aunt Satya (Shabana Azmi) is agitated. Shivangi sees an apparition of a girl, and the adults hear strange noises in the house. Shivangi suspects that the truth lies in a scrapbook kept by Aunt Satya that is full of horrifying drawings and lists of girls’ names. This is not a safe place, but Darshan refuses to leave, even after his mother dies.

Director Terri Samundra — who co-wrote Kaali Khuhi with David Walter Lech — goes for an eerie tone rather than out-and-out scary, but it’s not totally successful. Apprehensive characters approach every spooky sound at such a slow pace that any tension dissipates by the time they find the source. The film is only 90 minutes-long, but it still feels padded.

In all that padding lies a missed opportunity to better connect the family’s story to that of the town. The curse applies to the whole village for its traditional practice of female infanticide, yet we really only see what’s happening to Shivangi’s family. They feel removed literally and figuratively from the rest of the village, even though they weren’t the only ones to participate in the heinous tradition. As such, the theme isn’t explored as thoroughly as it could have been.

This disconnect between the village and the events at the family homestead make it especially confusing when Darshan insists that they stay, presumably abandoning their life in the city along with Priya’s doctors and Shivangi’s school. Possibly it’s the curse making him do it, but it’s unclear.

The performances are underwhelming when the most common direction is: “look concerned and move slowly.” Prolonged periods of quiet are interrupted by a character suddenly screaming, making for unpleasant sound design. And there’s a moment at the end when things get very, very gross.

The most interesting thing about Kaali Khuhi is positioning a 10-year-old girl as the protagonist. Shivangi hasn’t hit puberty yet, so she may not have gotten the “birds and the bees” talk from her parents. Burdening a young kid with the knowledge that her ancestors murdered their newborn daughters feels unfair. But Shivangi demonstrates that sometimes you have to act with courage even when you’re unprepared.

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