Given that the first Bhool Bhulaiyaa (2007) directed by Priyadarshan set the template for the modern horror-comedy, it’s unfortunate that Bhooth Bangla feels like a brain-melting horror comedy going through an existential crisis and an identity crisis at once. It’s 174 minutes long, shares several cast members with the 2007 hit, contains multiple personalities and moods and tones and genres, and features flashbacks and folklore so needlessly dense that the final hour feels like a zero-calorie mocktail of Mandala Murders, Indiana Jones and one of the Bhool Bhulaiyaa sequels. I usually worry about reviews being too long because I have so much to say, but this is a rare instance where I’m worried about getting past a paragraph. I might already be done.
The first half is essentially a montage of Akshay Kumar slapping Rajpal Yadav, and Paresh Rawal getting his posterior burned in myriad ways. The second half is one endless set-piece of a priest warning of the rise of a Kabir Singh-coded demon named Vadhusur if someone doesn’t mix the blood of a baby bat with the skin follicle of a dead bride and the hair strand of a zombified film critic on the least auspicious of 36,000 full-moon nights in a leap year. Or something like that. I’m all for Priyadarshan’s cinema of chaos, and I went in excited for my favourite version of Kumar (goofy), but the only thing haunted in Bhooth Bangla might be the audience that expects dual entertainment. I fully zoned out once the movie abandons its slapstick ways and becomes a supernatural period drama about renowned sages and loyal proteges and jealous sons and dormant devils. The film enters hallucinatory mode so confidently that it’s hard to imagine one scene being connected to the other, forget a tale-of-two-halves problem.
The storyline goes thus. Arjun (Kumar) is a London-based slacker who lives with his dad Vasudev (Jisshu Sengupta) and younger sister Meera (Mithila Palkar). Before we continue, I know what you’re thinking. Even by Bollywood standards, the age-gap license is nuts; the superstar is almost a decade older than the actor playing his dad and has more than 25 years on the actress playing his sister. Since this is a comedy (allegedly), I’d like to believe that it’s a gag to desensitise us and prepare us for Wamiqa Gabbi to be introduced as Arjun’s love interest. By the time she arrives, it’s not scandalous at all. Job done.
Back to the plot. Once Meera learns that her late grandfather left a fortune and an ancestral palace to her, brother Arjun flies to India to do a recce and ready this palace for Meera’s upcoming wedding to a boy from a superstitious family. So what if it’s supposed to be haunted and creepy? So what if brides have been abducted and killed on their wedding night in this town for years? So what if the legend involves a demon who was obviously jilted by a nymph he loved only for his spirit to wreak havoc on anyone who dares to get married for generations after?
Arjun spends the next week getting frustrated with the caretaker (Asrani), wedding planner (Rawal) and electrician (Yadav) in tandem, while a bat-like presence frightens the gang and possesses one of them every night. There’s also a mysterious young woman (Gabbi) who arrives to find her missing sister, but gets charmed by Arjun in the most random romantic track; it’s so random that it’d be a bigger twist if she wasn’t a ghost. Once he discovers that something is really off in the mansion — it only takes 100 accidents and 101 innuendos — brother Arjun becomes Action Arjun and spends the next half learning the truth about who he is and embracing his destiny. The change is so jarring that Kumar’s trademark cracked-voice comedy from the first hour is all but a distant memory by the time the carnage happens.
There were times I was willing myself to laugh early on, but the punchlines just never came. A dullness sets in, transitions do not exist, and you can tell that the cast is trying everything in their power to infuse life into the writing. Kumar, Asrani and Yadav yank the listless script towards a few chuckles (especially Arjun mispronouncing names and sentences), but the characters have no business being so repetitive in a 90-minute setup. They’re like live cartoons waiting for sound cues. I won’t even get into the cosplay-seriousness switch of the lore that follows, never mind a background score that borrows riffs from Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy (because bats are somehow the central theme of this film?). And to think that the entire movie is a story being narrated by an old ‘mystic’ to four boys waiting for their train at a station. They patiently sit through his whole story; they’re still there after he finishes. They are better than me. I’d have boarded a moving train headed in the wrong direction — just to get away.