Bhooty Call: Kaal

Because Kaal (2005) was produced by Karan Johar, it opens with a dance number starring Johar's most famous friend, Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Freaking Khan.  Khan is there to draw in a crowd, but when the dance number is over, he's gone and the crowd is left to deal with the rest of the movie.  This is almost certainly a metaphor for something.

Krishna Thapar (John Abraham) is a wildlife expert employed by National Geographic, though he's currently between assignments and spending his time engaging in shirtless snake wrestling and canoodling with his wildlife photographer wife, Riya (Esha Deol.)  That changes when visitors start dying in Orbit National Park, presumably victims of a man-eating tiger, and Krishna and Riya are dispatched to investigate.

Meanwhile, a group of quirky, hip young pals are on their way to a nearby farmhouse.  The group all have their own individual quirks: Sajid (Kushal Punjabi) is obsessed with his handgun and wants to use it for hunting, Dev (Vivek Oberoi) tends to introduce himself as "God" and whenever anyone annoys him he threatens to kill them under his breath, Ishika (Lara Dutta) is a woman, and Vishal (Vishal Malhotra) is also there.  

The trip to the farmhouse is derailed when they have serious car trouble, but Dev manages to convince creepy stranger Bagga (Vineet Sharma) to give them a ride.  Bagga notices Sajid's gun and offers to take the group camping in the national park, with maybe a little light poaching on the side?  And given that they have just met Bagga, don't like Bagga, certainly don't trust Bagga, and have all been warned repeatedly to stay out of the park because it is very dangerous, what with the man-eating tiger that has been killing (and eating!) people in the area, they agree.  It will be "an adventure."

Along the way the gang literally run into Krishna and Riya, in one of the movie's many, many car accidents, and since they are all going in the same direction, the decide to travel together.  And at this point, the movie falls into a sort of pattern.  Authority figures and local experts warn the travelers about dangers in the jungle.  The group ignores the warnings.  People die.  

At first it's other people doing the dying, including Krishna's driver and a friendly and easily bribed park ranger.  But then Sajid loses his head, goes off alone to hunt for rabbits, and, well, loses his head.  While searching for him, the car stalls, and the group are menaced by three tigers before being rescued by the mysterious Kaali (Ajay Devgn), a local guide who only speaks in dire warnings.  He promises the group that if they survive, he'll meet them again, and leaves.

After discovering what's left of Sajid, the group decide that heeding warnings might be a good idea after all, and decide to leave the park.  Unfortunately, the monsoon season has just started, and the main roads are blocked.  Fortunately, Kaali returns, and offers to guide them to their final destination.

At this point, Krishna is beginning to suspect that it's not a tiger killing people.  He asks Kaali about it, and Kaali carefully tries to explain that this is a ghost movie rather than a killer tiger movie.  he begins telling a spooky campfire story about a local guide who began leading tourists to be killed by wild animals before the villagers killed him in turn, and the name of that guide was . . .. but nobody lets him finish the story.

And at long last, spooky things start to happen.  It starts with bad dreams, but soon the group are threatened by wildly improbable accidents, and people start to die.  The film nobly tries to maintain a sense of mystery about what supernatural force is behind the deaths.  Could it be the mysterious stranger who is dressed in black, constantly predicts that people will die, is played by the biggest name in the cast, has nearly the same name as the movie, and told the story of the original haunting but was interrupted before he could add "And that ghost was me!"?  This is a hard one.

The makers of Kaal deserve some credit for trying to break away from old horror movie formulas and create something new; this is a ghost story that takes place almost entirely in bright daylight, after all.  But that credit can only stretch so far, because the film fumbles the execution.  The early jump scares completely fail to land, and that sets a tone.  The characters range from smug and unpleasant (Dev) to inoffensive and bland (Ishika), but they all speak and behave like they've been written by a bad AI that watched a thousand hours of soap operas.  It's hard to get attached when the ghost is the only character with clear motivations.

Don't let the opening dance number lure you in; the hidden dangers of a dodgy script lurk in the cinematic underbrush.  I knew it was a metaphor!