Pari : Movie Review

Pari almost succeeded in capturing the hair tingling feel of the horror-paranormal genre but somewhere in its germination from a nascent story to big screen it got bitten by Bollywood reality bug. If it had to sell in the Hindi heartland or even in India's metros where wearing hearts on sleeves is the norm, it had to take into account the non-negotiable ingredient of 99.9% mainstream Hindi movies - Pyaar! (Love) And down the chute goes the twilight scented, monsoon washed, Bengali story about Islamic werewolves.

I like movies produced by the brother-sister duo Anushka and Karnesh Sharma. I felt Pari was indeed better than the much touted recent paranormal outing in Malayalam - Ezra.

The screenplay and the story could have used some all purpose glue, seems all over the place by trying to sound more complex and cryptic that it actually is. Rajat Kapoor had to bear the burden of playing the all-knowing modern day fakir / exorcist who was only equipped with some incomprehensible and mysterious Arabic phrases to exorcise the jinns.

Yet technically - screen design, costumes or the overall production design of Pari is above par. Freckled, white as a ghost Anushka looked out of place among the dark skinned Bangladeshi or Bengali peasants. But it was not the ill-suited heroine, who to her credit, showed amazing acting chops, who led to the ultimate failing of the movie - it was pyaar (love), the much needed element in Hindi films, totally out of place in this film, that brought it down in my eyes.