Starring: Konkona Sen, Emraan Hashmi, Huma Qureshi, Kalki Koechlin, Pavan Malhotra
Directed by Kannan Iyer|
Rating: **
Ek Thi Daayan feels like two distinct films joined at the interval. In other words, another recent Hindi film that suffers from the curse of the second half. What begins rather well, with just the right dose of some imaginative chills and thrills, unravels shockingly fast all the way to an uninspiring, insipid climax.
Emraan Hashmi is magician Bobo, happily in a relationship with Tamara (Huma). He sees strange visions, of his dead sister Misha with a doll in her hand, of her lying dead inside a big chest with a lizard on her face. A session of what seems like past life regression therapy with his psychiatrist takes us back to his childhood. He used to be a pugnacious, precocious 11-year-old (Vishesh Tiwari) reading books like Kaal Daayan Aur Shaitaan. He used to try time-travelling to hell by pressing 666 on the building elevator. It’s here that witchcraft, the occult and supernatural all coalesce into a nicely scary broth. It gets scarier if, like me, you harbour a deep-seated dread of lizards, specially those that make weird noises and intentionally keep falling on you from the ceiling. To top it, there is the smattering of wit: every building, according to the kid, has a hell, wherein reside evil people like the housing society secretary. It’s this significant presence of kids that makes the horror delicious and intriguing. Is all that’s occurring on the screen for real or all about a child’s overactive imagination? In comes Konkona Sen as the stepmother Diana and makes the proceedings even more tantalising. Not only does she steal everyone’s thunder with her wicked performance, she also leaves us at the interval with the promise of a more beguiling turn of events ahead. That, unfortunately, doesn’t happen. ETD lapses into the stuff that two other recent films—Raaz 2 and Aatma—were made of. And the inscrutability of the witch gets too conveniently resolved. Besides Konkona and Vishesh, Emraan Hashmi and Pavan Malhotra try and put their best acting chops forward. Huma and Kalki are let down by sloppy and half-heartedly written roles. For me the interesting discovery was Rajatava Dutta. Not because he performs well, but because he looks so uncannily like a younger, poor man’s Dhritiman Chatterjee.
High Fives
Bollywood
- Nautanki Saala
- Commando
- Chasme Baddoor
- Himmatwala
- Jolly LLB
Hollywood
- Oz the Great and Powerful
- Jack the Giant Slayer
- Identity Thief
- Dead Man Down
- Snitch
R&B/Hip Hop
- 20/20 Experience (J. Timberlake)
- Hotel California (Tyga)
- I'm Not a Human II (Lil Wayne)
- The Heist (M'more & R. Lewis)
- Wolf (Tyler, The Creator)
Courtesy: Film Information
