The first half of Nayyi Navelli plays out like the answer to the question: What if TVF Gullak is pushed into the supernatural space? There’s a quirky Meerut-based family. An ancestral home. Lots of squabbling. Plenty of fondness parading as noise and taunts. And an hour-long emergency meeting on the terrace (against an artificial background of the city that puts the hand-painted sunsets from the 1990s to shame). The black sheep, Bantu, is desperately trying to convince the rest that the newest entrant in the family is a ‘daayan’ (witch); that his elder brother Raja’s wife, Mohini, is not a normal woman. It’s like watching a low-budget courtroom tale. Bantu painstakingly offers proof of the last few months and the mysterious circumstances of her arrival. He recalls weird scenes, narrates eye-witness accounts, and provokes the irritated family members to punch holes in his narrative. All this while an inauspicious and allegedly possessed Mohini — who will soon get multiple entry shots — is locked away in a room.
Despite the stage-play setting, Nayyi Navelli has the seed of a radical horror-comedy idea. The women of the household credit Mohini for liberating them from patriarchal shackles. The old lady screams feminist slogans like “Burn the bra!” and “Your body, your choice!”. The middle-aged aunt is no longer a spinster, thanks to Mohini, who found her an IAS-officer bachelor so eligible that their recent wedding beggars belief; this features a Jacqueline-Fernandez gag that’s almost funny. They all refuse to entertain Bantu’s claims, but the evidence of her flashbacks mounts up; Mohini also leaves a trail of crippled (or dead) men in her wake. Yami Gautam Dhar is worryingly persuasive as the other-worldly Mohini that Bantu says she is. Her husband, Raja, is a good man who begins to doubt his own luck: why, after all, would the group-head of his company marry a mediocre minion like him? You sense the social angle: a ‘different’ woman is scrutinised through the male gaze. Everyone sees what they are conditioned to see, in a society rigged against female agency. Fear spreads. So far, so Stree-coded.
The twist, of course, is that Mohini isn’t who they think she is. The second half spends a while replaying those same scenes from another perspective, thus shaming the viewer for agreeing with Bantu. But the mythological direction Nayyi Navelli takes is consumed by its own reverence and awe: like a homegrown Dan Brown novel in search of national validation. The film joins the recent spate of devotional mytho-dramas that insist on treating fiction as actual history. There is some gender subversion in the good-versus-evil arc thrust to the fore, but the writing refuses to entertain it beyond a point. The monster hidden in men, a female-superhero vibe, and the general misogyny in middle India are flattened into a slew of fabled and non-negotiable themes. It becomes dense, dull, preachy, and too afraid to be playful with the Ramayana (except for a musical number that demolishes Ravana’s living-dead zombies).
Nayyi Navelli then unfolds like a spiritual sibling of The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest, the other TVF production that straddles this predatory genre. This film is far more accomplished in terms of craft and visual effects, but nobody wins. The posturing is obvious. Mohini spends the half verbally educating her husband’s family about Valmiki’s literature with a divine smile on her face. The submit-or-else tone is strong. It’s an accurate metaphor for how the film sees its audience: subservient, all ears, respectful, ignorant, and ready to be mytho-splained at the drop of a (holy) hat. The central performance becomes the weakest link because the film settles for safety and self-seriousness. It’s always strange that, for an ancient culture with some of the most layered mythology, mainstream Indian cinema consistently churns out takes and adaptations so devoid of personality. The deference is understandable, I suppose, unless there’s an RRR-sized smokescreen. But I’m not sure most creators are wired to be creative about folklore anymore. It doesn’t take much to offend only one of a billion-plus restless people. An irreverent phrase here, an artful image there.
As a result, Nayyi Navelli does the hard part of setting up the human-comedy vessel, only to then renege on its own cheeky ambition and collapse into a lopsided star vehicle. Of the supporting cast, Adinath Kothare does well to make the most of Raja’s mutation; Anurag Thakur is fine as Bantu, but the brief to ‘Be Abhishek Banerjee’ weighs down on his extended screen-time. The rest of them (especially Mita Vashisht) have a few colourful moments, but they’re too busy being scolded and infantilised by the film for not knowing their Ramayana. You don’t win a prize for guessing that the effigy-burning climax happens at a Dussehra fair. The long disclaimer at the beginning of Nayyi Navelli not only gives away its plot, it also cautions against superstition and the exploitation of faith. What follows is the irony of the modern-day Bollywood film.