The eponymous forest – it has existed since the 7th century, viewers are told in a hurried introduction – is a human voice. It emanates from a goddess carved in stone.
The rock god has eyes that glow like traffic lights in the dark. Only those who dare to venture into the forbidden, mysterious forest at night, but only a few are left to tell the tale. It is the deep fear of the unknown that keeps people away from the forest after sunset.
In the climax, a crowd is divided by what they know or whether they are not there together. A long quarrel erupts. The clash is the kind that leaves one completely cold.
Vavan – The power of the forest is a film that begins unremarkably but becomes difficult to digest as it spirals into a denouement that is more confusing than anything that has gone before.
A prologue – a desperate king enters the forest at night to rescue his sickly pregnant wife – reveals in broad terms what lurks there. It calls for a willing suspension of disbelief. As the demand gradually worsens, it becomes impossible to believe.
At the heart of the story is the denouement of a young man who returns to his native village after a gap of six years. He sees no reason why he should buy into the myths being spread among the people.
Halfway through the film, the same man speaks: Now living in my little community. Yes, this is only something that the characters and the audience can understand in this kind of film.
The rest of the story is pure, eye-rolling gobbledygook, albeit of a generally harmless kind. Things get weirder and weirder as the story unfolds. As the character struggles with conflicting emotions, none of us are the wiser.
This is not surprising at all. The writers themselves (Anandeshwar Dwivedi and Arunabh Kumar) are at sixes and sevens about which direction they should steer the film. It is the ‘bulldozer’ logic that is usually at play here. Literally so.
That piece of heavy machinery is seen in two sequences. In the opening sequence, a bulldozer breaks down, goes berserk and endangers lives at a construction site.
Nayak, an atheist engineer, brings the machine under control but not before puncturing the pipeline. Water splashes and falls on the Shivling. A religious hymn plays on the soundtrack.
Much later in the film, another bulldozer appears, this time deep in the forest. It is brought by a person who wants to remove trees from his path and not only because he is into timber smuggling.
Yes, there are many people in the film who want to destroy the forest but wawan It’s not the kind of rooted-in-science environmental thriller you’d expect.
It is too enamored of the mythology that it builds around the temple in the forest to trace its origins to the level of a suitable cautionary tale about the sanctity of the natural world, even if one believes that a divine power is watching over it.
Directed by Deepak Kumar Mishra and produced by TVF Motion Pictures and Balaji Telefilms Limited, wawan is a misguided missile that seems to question blind faith and superstition even as it wholeheartedly celebrates religious fervor and the power of prayer. It moves from one end to the other leaving a yawning gap in the process of transformation.
In the forest wawan A site where an ancient, myth-heavy battle takes place between good and evil, faith and skepticism, logic and naivety. Depicting the clash between tradition and modernity, the film, TVF’s first big-screen production, ties itself in knots.
Confusion reigns supreme in the film as much as it does in the mind of the male protagonist Rishi Kumar (Sidharth Malhotra). He is an engineer for a construction company pining for a child. He and his wife Mamata (Tamanna Bhatia) can’t afford IVF, so the man applies for a loan that is mired in red tape.
At the insistence of Rishi’s elder brother Shashi (Anup Soni), the couple and Rishi’s friend, vlogger Ved Prakash (Manish Pal), move from Mumbai to Dewanchal, a remote village in Bihar.
This is where the forest stands and this is where Rishi must fight his personal interests mainly represented by an old friend Deepak (Sunil Grover), who wants to dominate everyone in the village and let the government cut trees to build a road through the forest.
His sister-in-law Sushila (Shweta Tiwari) holds a grudge against him for an unresolved family feud and a tragic accident that they are unable to bear.
The family has an elderly aunt (Sulbha Arya), whom Ved Prakash believes is a witch to suck the blood of unknown men. Misunderstanding feeds a comic track. This is to provide some relief. It all adds up.
Sent into a tailspin, the film yo-yos between the awkwardly funny and the laughably serious. It’s funny or meaningful at either end of the spectrum.
The stick that Manish Paul gets is rough at both ends. He has no way of avoiding the crude nature of his gags. The shadows, silhouettes and grim thoughts that haunt him are interspersed to enhance the comic qualities but do little good.
Everyone else in the cast gives excellent performances in half-baked roles. In the absence of any scope to develop the characters into solid, believable figures, the actors can’t do much more than the film is overwrought.
Why, oh why, they would be the people who gave us India’s first web series and then came up with shows like this Panchayat And Gulak Do you think a run in a deep and dark forest will pay dividends?
Vawan – Force of the Forest is a film lost in the jungle. It never makes its way.