(No screenshots this week due to technical difficulties.)
Machchli Jal Ki Rani Hai (2014) has all the trappings of a traditional Bollywood haunted house movie, but like Bhoothnath, the genre swerves away form horror and in some unexpected directions. Unlike Bhoothnath, though, I'm not sure that the genre mixing is on purpose.
The movie doesn't open with the haunted house, it opens with Action Exorcist Ugra (Deepraj Rana) attempting to drive a spirit out of the body of a young girl. The attempt involves more wire-fu than you usually see in exorcisms, as well as a chase through the countryside.In the end, though, Ugra fails. The girl dies,and the ghost retaliates by brutally killing Ugra's entire family. He's promptly arrested, but on the advice of psychiatrist Bhatnagar, he's declared insane and sent to a very nice asylum.
Years later, Bhatnagar needs Ugra's help, so he visits the asylum and Ugra is released into his company. As they drive away, Bhatnagar fills the audience and the exorcist in on the important backstory with a long flashback.
Bhatnagar's daughter Ayesha (Swara Bhaskar) is married to Uday (Bhanu Uday), and they have a young son named Sunny (Yug Mahnot). A few months ago Ayesha was driving recklessly and caused an accident which killed a woman. Soon after, Uday was transferred to Jabalpur in order to reopen a factory; Uday is from Jabalpur so he's delighted to be reunited with his old friends, while Ayesha could really use a change. The family move into a company guesthouse,and at first everything is going well.
Sunny quickly makes friends with Guddi (Roshni Walia). Ayesha meets Guddi's parents; mother Urmi (Reema Debnath) is nice, but father Manohar (Murli Sharma) is surly and angrily insists that his wife and child need to stay in the house and Ayesha needs to stay away.
And then . . . well, it's a haunted house movie, and they tend to be fairly predictable. Ayesha starts hearing noises and seeing things around the house, and Uday refuses to believe her, or even really listen, even when people start dying. There's a fatal accident at Uday's work, then Mangla (Sakha Kalyani) the maid dies in a freak antler accident, followed by the exorcist Mangla brought Ayesha to see. Sunny is acting strangely. Ayesha is acting really strangely. Bhatnagar visits and also refuses to listen to Ayesha, telling her it's all in her head even though the beginning of the movie clearly established that he believes in ghosts.
Before long, Sunny is missing and Ayesha is possessed and on a rampage. At this point Bhatnagar remembers that he believes in ghosts, and also that he knows an Action Exorcist, so the flashback ends and the movie loops back to the beginning. Ugra confronts the possessed Ayesha, leading to the dramatic climax.
This is standard Bollywood haunted house stuff, and works in all of the familiar beats, including the scene when a passerby catches Ayesha eating something weird. (The family's pet goldfish, just to loop back to the nursery rhyme that gives the movie its title.) There are two twists, though.
The first twist is minor but clever; ghosts in this movie are more mobile than usual, so Ayesha and Uday's house isn't actually haunted - it's the place next door! It doesn't have a huge impact on the plot, but it does add an extra sense of danger, with no real safe places.
That sense of danger is immediately undercut by the other twist: this isn't really shot like a horror movie, it's shot like an action movie, with bright lighting and surprisingly kinetic exorcism scenes. At times it's practically a superhero movie; Ugra refers to his origin story at the beginning of the movie, and he is walking around with Doctor Strange's cape. (Or its Indian equivalent.)
I'm honestly not sure if they were shooting for action horror or just stumbled into it. It means the movie is never quite as scary as it wants to be, but the genre mix is at least interesting.
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