STREE (2018)
Director: Amar Kaushik
Welcome back to the good old Grandma stories of a witch hunting a haunted town, this time with the current trending tag of “women empowerment” only to please the multiplex audiences and gain brownie points.
The town called Chanderi somewhere in northern India is haunted by the ghost of a prostitute who’s aptly nicknamed “Stree” by the local residents, now this Stree only targets young men and abducts them by leaving behind their clothes! The legend has it that the ghost was deprived of her true love and is busy hunting for the same for years. A bunch of young “educated” and “modern” men take up the Herculean task of taming the lust hungry ghost in order to free the town from her “dehshat”!
The director Amar Kaushik has intelligently induced generous comedy with a tinge if horror to direct this Horror comedy which is essentially a rare genre in Bollywood , just how many such movies do you remember besides Bhool Bhulaiyaa (2007), now this movie has the actual horror in full form with that shocking element of loud thudding background score and the ghost wearing a supposedly scary mask with those eerie contact lenses. Kaushik does a fine job but is let down by a very weak editing & cinematography. The music is passable. Production values are not up to the mark.
Rajkumar Rao is fantastic as the young tailor who takes up the responsibility of hunting the ghost, mostly seen in serious roles and offbeat films he already proved his comic timing in the delightful Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017), he’s a delight to watch with his natural flare for comedy and impressive expressions to match his acting prowess.
Rao gets able support of actors Aparshakti Khurana and Abhishek Banerji playing his friends who join in his mission. Both of them are hilarious and succeed in tickling the funny bone. Pankaj Tripathi as a local paranormal activist practitioner has a smaller role but performs efficiently. Comparatively Atul Shrivastava, Mushtaque Khan and Vijay Raaz do not get roles as per their calibre or seniority.
Even though the movie is titled “Stree” and is essientialy about women empowerment and how “Mard ko Dard Hoga” etc etc the female cast is nothing more than mere decorative items, if Shraddha Kapoor ( as Rao’s love interest) is used to provide the romance quotient, Flora Saini as “Stree” is used only to scream and make scary faces, it’s the men in this movie who raise the standard of acting higher rather than the poor female cast, including the curvaceous Nora Fatehi who sizzles as a dancer in a stag party.
The movie does have its moments specially the comical sequences including Rao, Khurana and Tripathi or the one where Banerji gets possessed and creates havoc. Modern technologies like WhatsApp location are used in the movie in order to track the proverbial victims ! And the educated ghost of the prostitute is so obedient that she skips any house where they write “Stree Kal Aana”, reminding of a craze in the 90’s when people in Karnataka used to scribble “Naalleba”( come tomorrow) to ward off some ghost.
Overall this horror comedy is best viewed for its lead actor who plays his part so convincingly that you forget he’s a national award winning actor and actually start believing he’s an innocent naive tailor from a town called Chanderi, that’s how authentic and believable is Rao’s performance. If not interested can be easily skipped to wait for its television premiere shortly.
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