‘Vash Level 2’ Movie Review: Fear and Loathing in Modern Gujarat

A pack of teenage schoolgirls wreak havoc across a city. They overpower everyone and everything in sight, seemingly possessed by superhuman strength and violent desire. The attack is visceral and unstructured, like the beginning of a dance rehearsal gone wrong. Their school uniforms become a symbol of danger. The police are clueless; the parents are terrified. The setting is notoriously sexist, so the sight of them spreading chaos is oddly empowering. In most movies, it would be.

But Vash Level 2 is not most movies. The sequel to Vash (2023), Krishnadev Yagnik’s national award-winning supernatural thriller that was remade as Shaitaan (2024) in Hindi, our simplistic perception of female empowerment is thrown out of the window (or, well, off a terrace). Even their “rebellion” is defined by subservience; their agency is shaped by the crippling lack of one. For they are actually controlled by a sinister male stranger (Hiten Kumar) who laced their lunch with black-magic dust. The rampage is happening against the girls’ wishes; their bodies are weaponised but their minds are scared. Most of them attack hawkers, motorists and street-dwellers and bash their heads in, regardless of gender or status. The smash-the-patriarchy allegory unfolds like a cruel joke. The brainwashing and societal-conditioning metaphors unfold like punchlines.  

The spell they’re under looks familiar to Atharva (Hitu Kanodia), the forlorn caregiver of Aarya (Janki Bodiwala), his daughter who continues to be hypnotised (frozen with a smile, of course) 12 years after a demonic man, Pratap, entered their house and destroyed their family in the first film. One of the girls mentions that the “uncle” will toy with them until they find a guy named Pratap. That’s when Atharva re-enters the fray; he’s the only one who knows what’s happening. The events of Vash are neatly tied into this sequel; the writing and connections don’t feel forced, as they so often do in money-spinning franchises. The exposition dumps are softened by a constant undercurrent of dread. Every question we might have — Why after 12 years? What’s the motive behind the psychological manipulation (to put it mildly) of the girls? Why has Atharva kept a tongueless Pratap alive in a secret dungeon? — is answered in tense exchanges between Atharva and the new baddie. You can tell that the makers also put themselves in the shoes of the audience. The timing is eerie; every time I thought of a loophole, it was almost immediately addressed in the dialogue.

The film-making in Vash Level 2 is slick without being distracting. It’s not the Bollywood genre slickness that tends to overproduce every scene. For instance, the film opens with a dry-looking montage of different students going about their morning routine: arguing with the parents, taking the bus, bantering, shuffling into the gates, attending classes. The bustle is very matter-of-factly; we see one of them being chastised by a middle-class father about a boy she likes. Shards of stories collide before the bell rings, as if everyone is the protagonist until they merge to form the backdrop at school. It brings to mind early Ram Gopal Varma in his Bhoot and Kaun phase: amp up the ambience (with minimal background score) so that the horror feels like an extension of the monotony, not the exception to it. The action becomes the atmosphere. When things start to unravel at lunch, the escalation sneaks up on us. Any doubts about the plausibility of the situation are offset by the nightmarish mundanity of it. The principal, gym teacher and security guard — all adults — have no time to process the suspension of disbelief, and neither does the viewer. We’re too used to visual gimmicks and clues and buildups, so the ‘flatness’ is kind of disarming.  

The decision to stage a school as the center of conflict is an ambitious one. On paper, the story goes from public to private (mutating into a father-daughter arc), but a single mistake runs the risk of pulling the viewer out of the film. The scale of punctured everydayness expands to a point where the cacophony has to be choreographed and the background noise has to make sense. There are no false notes, though. All the young actors nail the awkward mix of haplessness and madness; the camera floats across the campus and spaces like a ghost on a revenge spree; the violence is as messy as it is vicious.  

More importantly, the gaze is not exploitative or predatory, which is something that Vikas Bahl’s Shaitaan was guilty of. Commercial Hindi cinema often misses the cultural essence of the stories they adapt, most evident in how the remake was titled after the villain (plus his main character energy) and not the central theme (Vash meaning “subjugation” or “influence”). There’s a fair bit of gore and gender-based abuse in the film, but none of it plays to the gallery of a country that needs no excuse to interpret masculinity as an anti-feminist stance.  

The setting of Vash Level 2 plays a key role in its ability to be provocative without resorting to torture porn. What used to be the wild outskirts of Ahmedabad are now a gentrified and overdeveloped string of upscale properties — a bit like what Gurgaon is to Delhi. The swanky concrete-and-brick school and bungalow exist in the margins of civilization, where the social dissonance between the past and the present is the perfect breeding ground for mutant male egos. There’s so much internalised patriarchy (posing as power and wealth) in the region that a mythical monster like Pratap is indistinguishable from the real ones in broad daylight. For example, even the inspector in charge uses chauvinism as a job tool. The angry dad in the beginning is a mild real-world version of the demon who pulls the strings. The security guard is the only one who thinks he can ‘rescue’ the girls; it’s how he’s wired to act.   

The school, too, is a place of rules and instructions and impositions and drills (two latecomers stop in their tracks during the pre-class national anthem), so the venue is fitting. It’s why the premise of unrestrained schoolgirls — avenging their futures while succumbing to the present — is as ironic as it is tragic. The expression of dissent and freedom is used against them; the language of breaking free is reduced to the grammar of a riot. When the film transitions to the Atharva-and-Aarya arc, it’s almost sobering to realise that the teens were collateral damage all along. When the volume of storytelling increases, the big picture remains in focus; not even an unconvincing change of fortunes in the climax changes that.  

The primary cast blends into their environment despite the high pitch. Hiten Kumar, who played Pratap in the first film, infuses the new villain with theatrical verve, almost like he’s auditioning to impress his peers and predecessors. Hitu Kanodia delivers a solid haunted-but-numb turn as the father struggling to retain his humanity; he lets his face become the cliffhanger in a memorable last shot. His reserved tenor makes a case for Ajay Devgn reprising his role in the sequel. In fact, part of the horror experience for me was precisely that — the lingering fear of an inevitable Bollywood remake. But you know it’s an absorbing film when you can nearly hear a bidding war for the rights the second the end credits roll. Janki Bodiwala plays the possessed daughter in the Gujarati originals as well as Shaitaan. She has perhaps 10 minutes of active screen-time, but her performance is so primal in this portion that it’s tempting to wonder why she was directed so differently in the Hindi counterpart. If you watch the Hindi-dubbed version of Vash Level 2 (titled Vash Vivash Level 2; go figure), the contrast of styles may look even starker.  

Horror cinema across the globe is having quite a moment. In light of the success of Weapons, it’s a good time to also appreciate the subgenre of spellbound kids and evil puppeteers. The age is ripe for commentary about radicalised innocence and hijacked souls. While the American breakout hit alluded to a specific anxiety about school shootings and community grief, the Indian iteration dramatises a broader interest in male-dominated tradition and institutionalised bigotry. While it would have been rousing to see the girls reclaim their identity and affect the fantasy, it’s a bookend that homegrown fiction cannot afford. It’s as if to say: even as perpetrators and survivors, they’re the victims; even female rage is stigmatised. There is no solution. So perhaps locking up the men — with their smokescreens of religion, mythology and silver tongues — is the most plausible escape. After all, why should others carry the burden of being heroic, responsible, defiant or safe? Why should everyone else inherit the duty of being a story?