Review: PARI

Pari Is Scary!

2.5 stars

Mini Review:

The hallmark of a good scary movie is that the scares come at you from all sides, fast and furious and do not allow you to breathe. This movie is slow to create the scary world, and even though you enjoy it, it takes too long to actually make you gasp for air. But what an awesome beginning for Anushka Sharma and Parambrata Chatterjee.

Main Review:

For a Bollywood film, Pari is way ahead of all other scary films we have seen over the last many years. Most scary films end up being laughed at. So You walk into this film with reservation. The Deadpoolesque hospital scene in the beginning makes you groan a bit. But then the story takes off. And you say, 'Wah! Shabaash! Kya daraya hai!' 

A car accident and then the guilt make a great place to start. 

Parambrata Chatterjee, whom you saw in Kahani, makes an impression as a shy man who has an active conscience that Pari likes.

Is that a good thing or bad? Who are the creepy men who seem to be chasing Pari with incense sticks...

When you create a fictional world with new demons and their stories, the movie has to make us believe. Some things in the film you just don't believe. Is the bucketful of water good or bad for Pari? Is Rajat Kapoor and his scary assistants (again, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, a familiar face, makes us believe in the creepy and the scary) up to any good? What is just not easy to swallow is how Parambrata accepts Pari as she is. No one questions why she is the way she was found, not even the police are curious as to why she has been living the way she does. Parambrata does ask how she reached home, but he does not question her motives. How does she manage to learn the strategic words from watching TV and not learn anything else? But the goings on and the special effects are superb. So you too begin to see Pari, played brilliantly by Anushka Sharma, who deserves kudos for experimenting with the kind of films she's making.

Of course no Bollywood film is complete without a couple of inadvertent laughs. That is provided by the annoying Piyali (the girl Parambrata is about to marry). Her dialog delivery is so flat and tedious you want someone to kill her. But she lives long enough to make the phrase 'yoga karein' the funniest thing in cinema this year...

The movie is slow, very slow. The pace manages to kill any fears rising up from the inside. And the film uses the same scare tactics as most horror films do: the ghost/scary object appears behind whoever is on the screen. But the biggest plus this movie has is the absence of sound. There are no creaking doors, ghostly haunting sounds, sudden loud sounds that make you obviously jump out of your skin. This movie has plenty to scare you on its own. Just wish they had kept the suspense going... We could look forward to a sequel then...




(this review appears on www.nowrunning.com )