Starring: Bipasha Basu, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Doyel Dhawan, Jaideep Ahlawat, Shernaz Patel, Tillotama Shome, Shiv Subramaniam, Darshan Jariwala
Directed by Suparn Verma
Rating: **
Aatma begins promisingly. The sinister school and its sneaky corridors, stairs, a ball, the restroom and the mirror house a good dose of dread. Terror laced with the theme of domestic violence and manic possessiveness that transcend time and space does tingle with immense possibilities. But it’s not sustained chillingly enough through the film. Bipasha plays Maya, a single mother trying to protect her daughter Nia (Doyel) and herself from the evil dead of a husband, Abhay (Nawaz). Beguiling? Not quite. The menace doesn’t extend beyond the school and the film lapses into the familiar cliches of Indian horror films: an intimidating old lady making creepy predictions, a pandit with a heightened awareness and perception of the ghosts, an inspector who seems to know there’s something amiss right from the first death and oft-heard lines like “kuchh cheezon ka explanation science bhi nahin de sakti”. It gets capped by a resolution that is way too underwhelming. The actor of the season, Nawaz, a prime attraction for many of us, doesn’t seem to haunt the screen as much as we’d have wanted. A glimmer of his psychosis and dissoluteness is visible in a divorce court scene, but then on he gets disappointingly reined in. So does the rest of a rather stellar cast. The film ends up being more of a Bipasha vehicle, who looks fetching in her nighties and lounge wear.
