Bhooty Call: Dhilluku Dhuddu 2

 Dhilluku Dhuddu 2 (2019) is billed as a "spiritual sequel" to the original Dhilluku Dhuddu; while both movies feature haunted houses and star-crossed lovers, the only real connection between them is branding.  Which is just as well, because I haven't seen the first one.

Maya (Shritha Sivadas) is being haunted, but it's a very specific haunting.  She never sees the ghost, but every time a man says that he loves her, the ghost will wait until he's alone and then beat him up.  It doesn't seem to kill anyone, which is very restrained for an Indian movie ghost, but it does rather put a damper on her love life.  That might be okay, since the only men we see taking an interest are either creepy, like the guy who follows her through a dark alley demanding that she love him back right now, or inappropriate, like Karthik (T. M. Karthik), her direct supervisor at the hospital where she works.

Meanwhile, our hero Viji (Santhanam) is . . . well, he's a jerk.  Viji works as a rickshaw driver and lives with his uncle (Rajendran).  Uncle and nephew are public nuisances, drinking every night, shouting and moving furniture through the streets, and picking fights whenever any of the neighbors try to get them to be quiet.  Viji does actually have a tragic backstory to explain his bad behavior, but it does not matter to the plot in any way.

Viji hurts his hand while disrupting a local politician's ceremony and beating up the requisite goons, and in the morning he demands that his neighbors get him medicine.  One of those neighbors is Karthik, fresh from his own ghost-delivered beating, and that gives him an idea.  He sends Maya to perform physiotherapy, and the whole neighborhood does their best to encourage Viji to fall in love.

The neighbors don't have to do much, honestly.  Maya is beautiful, kind, and pious, and when she lights a candle for his deceased mother, Viji falls immediately.  He even temporarily gives up drinking for her, and sober Viji is much less unpleasant, so she seems to be falling for him as well.  Viji gathers his courage, and just before Maya leaves to visit her family in Kerala, he confesses his love.  She tells him the same thing she told her other suitors, to ask again the next time he sees her, and that night, the ghost appears and beats him up.

Unlike Maya's other suitors, Viji doesn't scare that easily. Karthik explains that Maya's father Garudaraja Bhattadhri (Bipin) is a powerful magician, and Viji and his uncle travel to Kerala to ask for Maya's hand.  They have a bit to drink along the way, so Viji acts like a jerk when he meets Maya's father, disrupting his magical ceremony and generally being awful.  He survives the inevitable attack by sword wielding goons, but that still doesn't solve the ghost problem, so he goes to rival guru Chakra Mahadevi (Urvashi) for help.

And up to this point, the plot is basic Bollywood (or Kollywood, in this case) romance, with the young couple needing to earn their happy ending by navigating parental objections; it's Chennai Express with ghosts.  But there's a twist - both gurus are frauds, and the ghost has been around for over a century, summoned by a previous King of Black Magic to protect his daughter from the lecherous George Williams, a British nogoodnik who made a habit of seducing and abandoning Indian women.  

The ghost can be exorcised, but only if Viji and the rest of the cast can find the scroll used to summon it, now hidden in a bungalow filled with angry spirits.  It sounds like a recipe for some genuine scares, but instead the final setpiece is a Haunted Mansion style romp through the bungalow, with a drastic increase in slapstick in an already slapstick heavy movie.

The humor in Dhilluku Dhuddu 2 is very broad.  That can be a good thing, because it means the good jokes translate well, and there are some genuinely good jokes here.  It can also be a bad thing, because when the jokes fall flat, the language barrier won't help, and that also happens more than once.

When the movie is at its best, it has a sort of fairy tale feel.  Maya telling her suitors to ask again later is a classic fairy tale test of their courage, determination, and worth.  Viji is the one who passes the test, so he gets the girl.  It doesn't change the fact that he's a big jerk, though.  Maya can do better.