Review: MONA DARLING

Good Start But Lame Ending

2 Stars

Mini Review:

Indian School of Technology is located in a remote place where forensics will take at least a few days to land. Forensics are called because four students have been brutally killed by something that has bitten off their limbs and necks and heads. A good start to a horror film, but it slowly falls into cliches and is unable to recover. Bollywood has never made worthy to be slotted as ‘Horror’ but this one makes an effort.

Main Review:

Making an MMS that spreads across the campus seems like a child’s play for those who can manipulate social media. Four lads ‘ruin’ a girl’s reputation with a video and she is forced to leave college. The dean attempts to pacify the girl, by punishing the perpetrator.

But on a rainy night (‘All good stories start on a Monday’ is the quote when the movie begins. Clever. It gives hope to a horror movie fan.) when a girl and a boy attempt to make out, a phone call boasts about how the boy should look forward to the impending arrival of Mona, the darling of all boys, the girl who had left college in shame.

Of course, the boys who cackle about her misfortune are dead. But Mona’s roommate Sarah (Divya Menon) is worried that she’s missing. Trouble with the story here, is that the timeline is very confusing. Did Mona go to the Dean’s home for dinner immediately after being insulted and laughed at? Or after many months? If it happened immediately, then why are the two - the dean and the girl - having dinner calmly?

You want to give the film a chance so you watch. Sarah asks a geeky lad Wiki (Anshuman Jha) to help find Mona. After all it was his access code that helped the four baddies spread the MMS. The two amateur detectives traipse all over the campus trying to figure out where Mona is.

If the two detectives wore a fitness tracker, their wristbands would be beeping every ten minutes. They walk everywhere. Discovering clues. The police are there too. And the students have been told to stay put in together, not allowed to venture out. As horror movie tropes go, it just seems to be falling into the easy trap: everything seems to be happening in the dark. The lightbulbs flicker, but there’s net connection. The cops are there, but they don’t seem to do any real work. The librarian is creepy for no reason. The books in the library seem to be an odd choice in a ‘Technology’ institute. Also, are there so many girls in a ‘Technology’ Institute? The idea that the college infirmary might not be equipped to do autopsies on dismembered bodies, but no one cared to put the dead bodies on beds without mattresses. And they did not stink? It’s that confusing timeline to blame...

The end is convoluted and a tad unbelievable, but a fun watch nevertheless. Frankenstein is a great inspiration, but we don’t know until the end why those four lads could not just be dead by broken necks. Why did they need to be dismembered and eaten? The last eye-opening scene is a fun end. ‘A’ for effort.

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)