Om Bheem Bush (2024) is very much a movie of two parts. That's not unusual for Indian cinema, but the shift is so dramatic that it's really hard to discuss the movie without spoilers. Expect spoilers.
The movie starts with college principal Ranjith Vinukonda (Srikanth Iyengar) describing his encounter with students Krish (Sree Vishnu), Vinay (Priyadarshi Pulikonda), and Madhav (Rahul Ramakrishna). Each of the three has a special quirk that has led them to study parapsychology: Krish can find lost objects, Madhav can see ghosts, and Vinay builds machines with actual science. They seem promising, and Ranjith accepts them gladly, but actually they are here for student hijinks, up to and including running a nightclub on campus. So to get rid of them, Ranjith completes and publishes their theses, gives them diplomas and doctorates, and shows them the door. Then he vanishes from the movie completely, because he's just a framing device.
The trio wind up in the village of Bhairavapuram, and after witnessing the local tantric (Shaan Kakar) at work searching for lost treasure and exorcising ghosts, Krish decides that they can do that too, but with scientific trappings. The boys open their troubleshooting outfit, put on snazzy uniforms (with Ghostbusters patches), and go to work solving problems.
They're actually pretty successful, almost despite themselves. And along the way Krish manages to catch the eye of Jalaja (Preity Mukhundan), the sheltered daughter of the brutal village chief (Manish Kumar). It is a dangerous courtship but he feels like he can -
Okay, wait, hang on. This is an October review. Where's the ghost?
There's a ghost. The palace outside of town is haunted by Sampangi, who is so consistently angry that the village has special protocols and curfews in order to evade her notice, and no one in the village thinks that's unusual. Sampangi is supposed to guard a fabulous treasure, but nobody has been able to enter the palace long enough to find it, because as mentioned earlier, angry ghost. The Tantric is angry at these outsiders stealing all his business, so he challenges them to enter the palace and retrieve the treasure. And they agree, though Krish insists on Jalaja's hand as part of the bargain.
The boys move into the palace and everything goes a bit Bhool Bulaiyaa for a while, complete with the individual hauntings and the locked Door That Must Never be Opened. Sampangi enjoys tormenting Vinay and Madhav, but she seems quite taken by Krish. Vinay realizes that they need to know more about Sampangi to figure out a solution, so they set Krish up on a ghost date. Sampangi opens up and reveals some of her backstory, and that's when the shift happens.
Sampangi was once a prince (Manish Kumar) with a gentle spirit and a love of dance. Krish's former incarnation Madhana (Surya Srinivas) was the warrior hired to train the young prince and "toughen him up." Instead, they fell in love and eventually fled to Bhairavapuram. In the palace they created their own private world, free from the judgement of others, and they were happy. One day Madhana left the palace, telling Sampangi to wait for his return.
The boys make some stupid jokes, buy their hearts aren't really in it, because they are moved by Sampangi's story. Krish decides that the only thing that will grant her peace is the wedding she never got a chance to have in life, and so that is the plot from that point on. He's going to marry the ghost because it's the right thing to do.
Normally when a movie has a big shift in plot and tone like this one, it has a promising beginning and then falls apart. This is kind of the opposite, because for the first half of the movie it was a reheated farce with horror comedy trappings and genuinely unlikeable lead characters. When the big twist happened I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised that Krish and his bros turned out to be caring and compassionate people after all.
This is not a great movie; the humor is always a bit too broad, the college shenanigans quickly outstay their welcome, and the scary scenes are just too dark to properly see what's going on. The tag line is "No Logic Only Magic," and it certainly delivers on the "No Logic" part. But it is a movie with its heart in the right place. I am not really qualified to say whether this is good representation or not, but Sampangi is treated as a person that matters rather than a joke.
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