Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on May 30, 2003, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
At the opening of the Indian horror film Bhoot, a statement appears from the director informing the audience that his intentions are solely to scare them, and that the story does not reflect his own personal belief in the supernatural. He also suggests that pregnant women and those with heart conditions might want to think twice about watching the movie, due to its intensity. This is a nice bit of William Castle-style ballyhoo, and it raises hopes for Bhoot (playing in a number of U.S. cities). Considering that Indian cinema is known for its flamboyance, with its heightened emotions and de rigueur musical numbers, one could reasonably expect something fairly outrageous, or at least out of the ordinary. Instead, Bhoot ends up as a pale (though exceptionally noisy) imitation of recent ghost films from other Asian countries and, in its second half, The Exorcist.
“Bhoot” is an Indian term for a ghost or other supernatural manifestation, and the simplicity of the moniker is reflected by the prosaic story. Financial worker Vishal (Ajay Devgan) moves himself and his wife Swati (Urmila Matondkar) into a new home on the 12th floor of an apartment building. What he doesn’t tell Swati at first is that a previous tenant, a young woman named Manjeet, died in a fall from the balcony; as he figures, “Every house has had someone or other die in it.” But it’s not long before Swati finds out about the deceased girl for herself: Manjeet begins appearing in mirrors and then in hallucinations that Swati suffers, and she eventually becomes possessed by the angry spirit and winds up bound to her bed, speaking in tongues that are not her own.
It’s pretty basic and derivative stuff, as director Ram Gopal Varma emulates the fear-in-the-corners-of-ordinary-settings approach of Ringu and other Asian spookers, before the influence of the William Friedkin classic takes over. Of course, in a film like this, the devil (excuse the pun) is in the details, and Varma does achieve a couple of frissons, most notably through a nifty scene set in a packed movie theater (showing Spider-Man!) and the revelation of a twisted corpse. Too often, though, he settles for standard shock effects and lets the soundtrack do the work for him; Salin Sulaiman’s music is thunderously overwrought and overcranked, employing a series of the loudest “stingers” in recent memory to make the audience jump.
Just as crucially, the script by Sameer Sharma and Lalit Marathe remains stranded in the banal, letting a number of interesting subtextual possibilities slip away. There’s the hint of a comment on the way American pop culture has overwhelmed Indian culture (see Spider-Man reference above), and the old science-vs.-religion conflict briefly raises its head, but nothing is made of them. By the end, the afflicted and bound Swati winds up surrounded by women (such as a medium played by Rekha, a much more attractive exorcist than Max von Sydow) who believe her, while her husband and other men (including A Passage to India’s Victor Banerjee as a psychiatrist) stand off the side in doubt, yet little comes of this promising division of the sexes. The final frustration arrives with the inevitable revelation of the ghostly Manjeet’s purpose, which hinges on a character who, until the climax, has never appeared on screen and has barely even been mentioned.
For all its flaws, I suppose I’m cutting Bhoot a bit of slack because it’s always interesting to check out what foreign filmmakers, especially those receiving little American exposure, are doing in the genre. And I do support the movie’s U.S. release in a general way, if only because it hopefully heralds a new wave of Indian horror/supernatural fare to come, and I look forward to experiencing more of what this unique filmmaking culture has to add to the genre. Bhoot itself, on the other hand, its Hindi dialogue notwithstanding, plays like nothing so much as its own dumbed-down American remake.
