‘The Raja Saab’ Movie Review: Prabhas In A Haunting Misfire

Within minutes of the curtains rising, Prabhas’s horror-comedy The Raja Saab burns through almost all the horror tropes in the book. A haunted house, a mangy black cat, a headless ghost, a piano that mysteriously plays itself, a rocking chair that swings on its own command, and a portrait of a million eyes staring through you to haunt your soul. It also takes the duration of its time to check off every [horror] “comedy” trick in the book: the hero is unwittingly forced to choose between three different women who are madly in love with him, physical comedy is accompanied by a band of screaming sidekicks aiding the hero’s mission, all with an endless supply of off-colour jokes. One could overlook high doses of familiarity in search of harmless laughs. But The Raja Saab turns away every chance to turn the barrage of stereotypes into campy fun. It remains strangely colourless.

Prabhas and Zarina Wahab in 'The Raja Saab'

The film begins with a half-decent idea, which centres around the power of love. There’s only one thing Raju (Prabhas) loves more than anything in the world: his grandmother, Ganga (played quite convincingly by Zarina Wahab). The actors share an effortless chemistry, which makes our minds reluctantly overlook the strangest situations the film chooses to place them in. Ganga suffers from Alzheimer's and is the perennial source of care and concern for Raju. When Ganga sends Raju on a mission — to bring his exiled grandfather (Sanjay Dutt) back home — he learns about his lineage.

When Raju learns the secret behind his family’s lore, he also learns the truth about his grandmother, which forms the most interesting part of the film. Stories of an eloquent queen being renounced from her throne are folded into another subplot about a man’s singular aim to control a woman’s mind, adding somewhat of an edge to the Telugu film’s plot. But the film naturally has to move on to its obligations to the formerly observed checklist. Just when the plot thickens, the film cuts and painfully moves our attention to two different romances that remain largely dense. The Raja Saab doesn’t bestow the respect it carefully saves for Wahab on the other ladies in the film, Malavika Mohanan and Nidhhi Agerwal, who play reductive archetypes films like this usually love to chase: the angelic Bessy (Agerwal) and the promiscuous Bhairavi (Mohanan).

Prabhas and Sanjay Dutt in 'The Raja Saab'

The film also stars Sanjay Dutt and Boman Irani in what could have been important roles. Dutt’s villainy comes not just from a place of plain, pointless horror, but out of greed and a lust to take over people’s minds. This is explored in a few scenes where he tries to expand his impressive grasp over hypnosis. But in a film which chases templated largeness, even tiny pockets of freshness seem like something we’re reading too much into. Thaman’s score, which is a cocktail of the indelible Harry Potter and Ratsasan themes, crudely brings us back to reality.