Desperate as hell to look and sound like a movie serving up a fresh-off-the-oven creation, newScripted by Divya Nidhi Sharma from a story by Himanshu Sharma, the dark color palette and cast of actors of proven quality are bent on outdoing each other.
The result is a film that neither looks beautiful nor feels right. Talk overshadows action and logic plunges into a confusing day of clashing decibel levels.
Director Balaji Mohan ropes in GV Prakash Kumar to provide the background score as well as compose the songs, but nothing really contributes to enliven the film to help it rise above the cacophony and become music to the ears.
But then there is Yami Gautam Dhar leading the duo and trying to inject glamor and move forward. Anurag Thakur goes without yakty-yak. Through no fault of the actor it’s tiresome and annoying. The writing is to blame – it creates a lot of sound and fury but makes little sense.
Before it all begins, the film offers a long disclaimer asking viewers to use discretion in dealing with what is being presented on screen. It’s as much an acknowledgment of the film’s failings as an appeal to the viewer to be lenient with their judgment of the show’s fare.
newAn Amazon MGM Studios and Color Yellow production film, claims (in the above disclaimer) to be inspired by Ramayana. But the audience is never quite convinced to believe the claim that good triumphs over evil, the importance of family duty and a hero who triumphs over all odds driven by an ‘epic’ vision.
Set in Meerut, the script focuses on Mohini, the India head of an MNC. His entrance scene ends with a giant flag falling and killing a hideous corporate executive. In the pool of blood, a romance blossoms. The love affair marries the woman to a colleague, Raja Awasthi (Adinath M. Kothare), a victim of the slain boss. His entry into the haunted house makes the cat stand among the pigeons.
Here the cat represents the exploited, neglected and outnumbered women who are now on the verge of settling scores with the world – thanks to Mohini’s powers – and the pigeons represent the entire society (and families). The hunters are on the backfoot in the film, but the commentary on the attack on social evils is absurd.
In one sequence, Mohini embarrasses Raja’s father (Sunil Sinha) into thanking his wife Asha (Sunita Rajwar), who is making millions of cups of tea for the baby gathering to finalize the heroine’s engagement to Raja.
The Awasthi family is horrified when Raja’s brother Bantu (Anurag Thakur), a bald youth repeatedly accused of being a ganja addict, reveals that the latter’s wife is Dayan, an otherworldly woman with the power to inflict serious harm on everyone around her.
new One of those horror-to-fathom horror comedies that Bollywood has been foisting on us with such regularity of late. It is neither funny nor on point with its treatment of the supernatural.
One of the characters, a pinky booa (Meeta Vashisht), marries an Indian Administrative Service officer (Aditya Kulshrestha) who, through Kohli’s tearful eyes, sees his bride as someone she is not and raves about her beauty. This is the level of comedy that the film offers.
Presenting itself as something of a feminist film, Nayi Naveli chooses to turn an unremarkable woman into a butt of ridicule. It uses a female empowerment theme to present a fantasy that is not only hilariously absurd, but also tragic at times.
It’s all for fun and games. It really isn’t. This is not to reinforce Bantu’s suspicions that his sister-in-law is a threat to the family.
If one puts aside one’s reservations about half-baked ideas it floats its way to explain what is happening in the mysterious world in which Mohini lives and gains power. new At least be an entertaining movie worth a multiplex ticket?
Not unless you believe that midwifery intervention is the answer to women’s labor woes. That’s the film’s problem: its flights of fancy are so sprawling that they never quite stick the landing.