Horror movies (at least the good ones) are an exception to many of the usual Bollywood rules about plot and story structure; they’re generally song free, for one thing, and tend to maintain a consistent tone and genre throughout, rather than being four wildly different movies crammed into three hours. Raaz (2002) is the exception to the exception.
The movie opens with a large group of college friends playing Spin the Bottle together out in the fog-shrouded woods of rural Ooty. Naturally, things go horribly wrong; Nisha (Mink Singh) wanders into the woods, where she sees something. Soon after, she brutally attacks her hapless boyfriend (Ali Asghar), and by the end of the night she’s strapped to a bed in a mental hospital, shouting that she’s awake now and “he” will have to come to her. Local professor Agni Swaroop (Ashutosh Rana) declares that Nisha isn’t insane, she’s possessed. She dies before his investigation can really get underway, however, so all the professor can do is darkly warn that the ghost will strike again, and there’s no way to know who or where.
Meanwhile, at a fancy party in Mumbai, Sanjana (Bipasha Basu) is desperately trying to attract the attention of her husband, hotel magnate Aditya Dhanraj (Dino Morea), who’s busy schmoozing with business contacts. The Dhanraj marriage is clearly in trouble; Sanjana is brittle, needy, and so addicted to sleeping pills that she pops a handful while still at the party, while Aditya is an insensitive doofus who almost certainly isn’t concealing a dark secret which could destroy both their lives. No, really!
Sanjana storms out of the party, but while driving home she’s suddenly distracted by a mysterious voice calling her name, and she flips her car over, and wakes up in a hospital bed, with Aditya at her side. (He’s not that insensitive.) Sanjana asks for a divorce. Aditya begs her for a second chance, and offers to take her on vacation anywhere in the world, so they can rekindle their marriage. Sanjana asks to be taken back to their house in Ooty, the place where they first fell in love.
Of course, the trip to Ooty is not the romantic idyll they were expecting. Soon after arriving, Sanjana starts hearing voices. Aditya blames the pills, and wants her to focus on fixing the relationship rather than asking questions about things which may or may not have happened in the house in the past, and which certainly had nothing to do with him, and what is that shiny thing over there? Sanjana is horrified to discover that the house’s long time caretaker, Robert, vanished several months ago after complaining about hearing the same voices, but Aditya again brushes aside her concerns, saying that he has a lot of servants, and he really can’t be expected to keep track of them all.
Fortunately, Sanjana can turn to Priya (Shruti Ulfat), who happens to be the best movie best friend ever. Priya suggests that they look into Vastu Shastra; there may be something wrong with the energy in the house which is causing the voices. They consult the local expert on Vastu Shastra, professor Agni Swaroop, and after a few traditional tests he tells the women that the house is haunted. Sanjana freaks out, and bursts in on Aditya’s business meeting to tell him about it. Aditya takes prompt action; he goes to the college and beats up Agni, warning him to stay away from his house, stop scaring his wife, and don’t even think about encouraging her to look into things which may or may not have happened in the house.
And that is apparently that. Except that Aditya is called back to Mumbai on business, and Sanjana, alone in the house, spends a terrifying night which ends with her seeing the ghost. Priya takes her back to see Agni, but he refuses to help, until Sanjana mentions that the ghost is a woman and Agni realizes that this is the same spirit who possessed Nisha. (I love Agni, because he gives a damn about the girl who dies at the beginning just to establish that this is a horror movie, and because he’s not an unflappable all-knowing Van Helsing type. He’s eminently flappable, and him knowing more about the supernatural than the other characters leads to him spending the bulk of the movie trying to control his rising panic.) The three start investigating in earnest, buried secrets are (literally) unearthed, and all hell breaks loose. (Not literally.)
The theme of the wife apparently being driven mad by supernatural goings on is familiar, but this movie is not another Bhoot; Bhoot is relationship horror, and is more about helplessly watching someone you love slowly unravel than it is about the ghost. There are elements of relationship horror in Raaz, as well, with the discovery that your life partner isn’t quite what he appears, but in the end it’s very much about the ghost. That’s not a bad thing, though; the ghost is genuinely scary, and the movie has one of the best wild shifts in tone I’ve ever seen, moving seamlessly from “find out what dark secrets have caused this haunting” to “run away from the reanimated corpse with the pickaxe.”
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