Click to play videoCast: Sudeep, Amruta Khanvilkar, Ahsaas Channa, Shrey Bawa, Jyothi Subhash, Ashwini Kaleskar, Kenny Desai, Ganesh Yadav, Lileete Dubey, K. K Raina, Zakir Hussain, Javed Rizvi, Anu Ansari, Shankar Sachdev, Kishore Kadam, Bharat Kaul
Director: Ram Gopal Verma
Right off the bat let's make one thing very clear -- Ramgopal Varma's Phoonk is not your classic horror film that'll send a shiver down your spine. It's a cheap gimmick of a film and I mean that in the best way. In fact, as far as gimmicks go, it's a pretty good one.
Phoonk is the kind of film that plays with sound to give you a scare. It's the kind of film in which booming background score will lead up to moments where characters turn around and find they were spooked by their own reflection in the mirror. It's the kind of film where the director will take all sorts of cheesy liberties like showing a character's hand grow unnaturally long to scare another character, but it turns out to be a dream.
Phoonk keeps you glued to your seat for most part of the film, and that alone is both its intention and its success.
The film's about a well-to-do builder and his family, who find themselves unable to understand the horrible things that happen to them suddenly. Torn between his own atheism, and the belief of everyone around him that supernatural forces may have a hand in the family's misfortunes, the man of the house digs deeper to discover uncomfortable truths.
Director Ram Gopal Varma sets up his drama very competently, establishing his characters and their motivations without any hiccups. Even though you're familiar with his tendency to shoot loving close-ups of all things useless -- like stray toys lying around the house, or those countless animal artefacts all over the place -- you have to hand it to him, Varma succeeds in building up a mood of tension.
In fact, all's going surprisingly well until intermission -- you're jumping up in all the right places, you're turning your face away every now and then.
It's when you return to your seats that Varma loses his grip. Instead of drawing our attention to a point he makes fleetingly, not strongly enough -- that ordinary people around us seem to practice black-magic in their homes -- Varma becomes interested in rehashing popular moments from classic horror films. It's the film's climax that lets it down completely. For one, it's a cop-out, a cliché, and secondly, it's just plain irresponsible.
Phoonk isn't too bad at all, but Varma's last outing in the horror genre Bhoot was a far more watchable film. I'm going to go with two out of five for Ramgopal Varma's Phoonk, it's an engaging one-time watch. Fifteen minutes shorter, and it might have actually been good. Watch it with a big group of friends, and see how the girls holler.
Rating: 2/5
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