Bhooty Call - 13B

13B (2009) has what my Creative Writing professor, Bill Ransom, used to call “benefit of subject matter.” The idea of a man haunted by a soap opera which seems to reflect, and then predict, his family life is an interesting one, and you can phone it in and still wind up with a pretty good movie. Fortunately, the makers of 13B didn’t phone it in.

Manohar (Madhavar) and his extended family have just moved into a spacious new apartment. (And it’s a good thing the apartment is spacious, because the family includes Manohar’s new wife Priya (Neetu Chandra), his mother (Poonam Dhillon), his spunky younger sister, and his brother (Sanjaih Bokaria) and his wife and children.) And in the beginning, everything is great. Sure, the milk is always curdled, the camera on Manohar’s BlackBerry keeps taking strangely distorted images, the elevator won’t work if Manohar is the only person in it, no one can manage to drive a nail in order to hang pictures in the prayer room, and the kindly blind neighbor’s seeing eye dog won’t go near the place without barking wildly at shadows, but nobody worries about the building being built over an old Indian burial ground because they’re the kind of ridiculously warm, loving, and supportive family normally found only in early 90’s Bollywood romances.

Manohar’s mother and the other women in the family love soap operas, and shortly after moving into the new apartment, they stumble upon the first episode of a new serial called “Everything’s Fine,” which which depicts a ridiculously warm, loving, and supportive family of the sort normally found only in early 90’s Bollywood romances moving into a new house together, and there are ghosts. The women are immediately hooked.

Manohar is the only one to notice that events on “Everything’s Fine” are being reflected in the lives of his family members. At first, everything is, well, fine. Manohar’s brother gets a promotion and a sizable raise, just like the older brother on the show. Manohar’s sister passes all her exams, just like the sister on the show. Priya is pregnant, just like the young wife on the show. But then Priya is injured in a kitchen accident, just minutes after the young wife on the show falls down the stairs.

Even after Priya’s miraculous recovery (also predicted by the show) Manohar is terrified, and turns to his old friend Shiva (the reliably cool Murli Sharma), a police officer, for help. Shiva, naturally, laughs in his face. He stops laughing during an afternoon visit to the family home; a police officer visits the family on “Everything’s Fine,” but is called away when his wife is injured by an exploding gas main. At Manohar’s insistence, they rush over to Shiva’s house, just in time to save Shiva’s wife from a gas leak.

Now that they know they can prevent the events predicted by the show, Shiva and Manohar are trapped; if the two men want to protect their families from disaster, they have to know what’s coming, and Manohar’s apartment is literally the only place you can see “Everything’s Fine.” And then Manohar discovers a buried album of photos from the seventies, depicting a family who look exactly like the cast of the soap opera . . .

Far from being phoned in, 13B is very well put together. The film steers clear of most of the Bollywood horror cliches, apart from some early reliance on the “shoot something innocuous from a weird angle while playing creepy music” trick. And the big twists caught me by surprise while still making sense and building on what has come before. The story is tight.

Ultimately, just as Bhoot is relationship horror, 13B is family horror, less concerned with spooky ghosts doing spooky things in a spooky way than it is with a man trying desperately to protect his family without letting them know that anything is wrong. And since his family are ridiculously warm and loving and supportive, without being obnoxious about it, the film shows that family is something worth fighting for.