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 It’s impossible to scavenge a single moment of originality in ‘Baazaar’. Director Gauravv K. Chawla tries to put on the big boots of Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone to present an Indian twist to those iconic Hollywood Wall Street mov­ies about big-league stock market players. But Baazaar is a film made without gambling much on new ideas. Instead it sails on safe waters to head on a narrative journey that has been done to death. Small-town stock trader Rizwan (Rohan Mehra) thinks it’s time to leave behind his middle-class roots and his principled father, who val­ues honesty and simple living, for a high-stake life of stock trading in Mumbai. After reaching Mumbai, the gooey-eyed and determined Rizwan works hard to first get accepted at a top-tier stock brok­ing company and climb the ladder to ultimately work side-by-side his idol Sakun Kothari (Saif Ali Khan), a self-made business tycoon known for his questionable investment methods. Once our young rookie gets close to the seasoned player, it becomes pretty clear that swim­ming with sharks like Sakun comes with both perks and threats.

The screenplay doesn’t get too hard on the protagonist. Writers Aseem Arora and Parveez Sheikh pepper many mini-crises and close escapes at regular intervals. None of these land any empathetic effect or make us care for Rizwan.

We see him easily cruising out of these sticky situations because the writers give him too many lucky breaks and chances. Rohan Mehra, the spruced-up debutant, as Rizwan has an overbearing pres­ence, amplified by his average act­ing talent and his weakly written character who is arrogant, over­confident and stupid, but never very likable.

Saif Ali Khan’s Sakun Kothari is also pretty generic and one-di­mensional. From his first scene he’s established as a menacing and mean-spirited sociopath. But his mind games get tad too repetitive and lose steam as the story moves on. And the women of Baazaar, Radhika Apte and Chitrangda Singh, are wasted. They function as mere plot devices and are never given any character depth.

With an unoriginal story and less-than-inspiring performances, Baazaar lacks the ambitiousness to sell something interesting about the Indian stock market.

Just like Rizwan hero-wor­ships Sakun, director Gauravv K. Chawla bows to films like 2013’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and 1987’s ‘Wall Street’ as his holy grail. And in an attempt to recreate the arcs and themes of those films, Chawla is too boxed in by the glitz and glare of the Hollywood por­trayal of the stock market world that he deprives us of a uniquely Indian context.

Baazaar is the kind of movie that could’ve worked had it released five years ago. Today, due to our exposure to lot of Ameri­can TV series and films, it feels formulaic and isn’t clever enough to make us rave about it. To say the least, the film will be easily forgotten and wouldn’t increase the marketing values of the makers and actors involved O

 It’s impossible to scavenge a single moment of originality in ‘Baazaar’. Director Gauravv K. Chawla tries to put on the big boots of Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone to present an Indian twist to those iconic Hollywood Wall Street mov­ies about big-league stock market players. But Baazaar is a film made without gambling much on new ideas. Instead it sails on safe waters to head on a narrative journey that has been done to death. Small-town stock trader Rizwan (Rohan Mehra) thinks it’s time to leave behind his middle-class roots and his principled father, who val­ues honesty and simple living, for a high-stake life of stock trading in Mumbai. After reaching Mumbai, the gooey-eyed and determined Rizwan works hard to first get accepted at a top-tier stock brok­ing company and climb the ladder to ultimately work side-by-side his idol Sakun Kothari (Saif Ali Khan), a self-made business tycoon known for his questionable investment methods. Once our young rookie gets close to the seasoned player, it becomes pretty clear that swim­ming with sharks like Sakun comes with both perks and threats.

The screenplay doesn’t get too hard on the protagonist. Writers Aseem Arora and Parveez Sheikh pepper many mini-crises and close escapes at regular intervals. None of these land any empathetic effect or make us care for Rizwan.

We see him easily cruising out of these sticky situations because the writers give him too many lucky breaks and chances. Rohan Mehra, the spruced-up debutant, as Rizwan has an overbearing pres­ence, amplified by his average act­ing talent and his weakly written character who is arrogant, over­confident and stupid, but never very likable.

Saif Ali Khan’s Sakun Kothari is also pretty generic and one-di­mensional. From his first scene he’s established as a menacing and mean-spirited sociopath. But his mind games get tad too repetitive and lose steam as the story moves on. And the women of Baazaar, Radhika Apte and Chitrangda Singh, are wasted. They function as mere plot devices and are never given any character depth.

With an unoriginal story and less-than-inspiring performances, Baazaar lacks the ambitiousness to sell something interesting about the Indian stock market.

Just like Rizwan hero-wor­ships Sakun, director Gauravv K. Chawla bows to films like 2013’s ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ and 1987’s ‘Wall Street’ as his holy grail. And in an attempt to recreate the arcs and themes of those films, Chawla is too boxed in by the glitz and glare of the Hollywood por­trayal of the stock market world that he deprives us of a uniquely Indian context.

Baazaar is the kind of movie that could’ve worked had it released five years ago. Today, due to our exposure to lot of Ameri­can TV series and films, it feels formulaic and isn’t clever enough to make us rave about it. To say the least, the film will be easily forgotten and wouldn’t increase the marketing values of the makers and actors involved.

 It isn’t November yet, the time of the year when the Oscar season begins, and we already get to see big Hollywood studios and small independent production houses champion their films to make the cut for the Academy Awards or the Oscars, as they are popularly called. In case of international films vying for a spot for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ category, the Oscar fever has already taken a strong hold. Most countries submitted their films in the last week of September to meet the October 1 deadline. Nepal’s submission this year is ‘Panchayat’, a coming-of-age film on menstrual taboo set in a rural village during the Panchayat period. The movie is directed by Shivam Adhikari and features veteran Nepali actor Saroj Khanal and Neeta Dhun­gana. Its chances of getting noticed and making it to the final shortlist look not only dim but pitch black.

The film released in March this year to lukewarm critical response and negligible commercial collec­tion. It had disappeared without a trace until it was announced as Nepal’s official entry to the Oscars. Surprisingly, Panchayat was one of only three films that actually applied to the Nepali selection committee. The other two were Samten Bhutia’s Maoist-insurgency based ‘Tandro’ and Japanese filmmaker Toshiaki Itoh’s ‘My Love: Promise for Kath­mandu’ that dealt with the 2015 Nepal Earthquake.

Just like Panchayat, the two films had no commercial or critical track record to be proud of. In the absence of real competition, the selection committee has the right not to submit a film for the year, but our committee nonetheless chose to hand a token victory to one film out of a tiny pool of mediocre films.

This is rather disappointing because the last two films to rep­resent Nepal—Min Bahadur Bham’s ‘Kalo Pothi’ (2016) and Deepak Rau­niyar’s ‘White Sun’ (2017)—at least had a visible presence at some of the world’s high-tier film festivals and enjoyed good coverage not only in national dailies but in international press as well. Both Bham and Rau­niyar had received various inter­national film funds to make their films and collaborated with foreign producers who hustled to help the directors get festival attention and crack international distribution deals. That still wasn’t enough.

Even when our films are in a slightly better position to compete, the Academy’s tricky and controver­sial selection process makes sure it trips us short of the final shortlist. At present the Academy picks its final nominations for Best Foreign Language Film through a two-phase filtration process.

In the first phase, all the eligi­ble submissions are viewed by the category specific award general committee members who cast a secret ballot. The top six choices are determined from these votes, while the executive committee of Foreign Language Film Award has been bestowed a special power to select three additional films, thus putting out a final shortlist of nine. In the second phase, the award com­mittee members view the films from the shortlist and votes are taken to determine the final five nominees for the category.

The general members of the Foreign Language Film committee have a history of favoring European films. Since 1958 European countries have swept the award 56 times while non-European ones have managed to win it only 14 times. As a response to the Euro-bias criticism, the afore­mentioned executive committee was formed in 2008 to help make an eclectic set of nominations. But the elbowing out of non-European films is still very much visible, as generally three out of five nominees are still films from France, Italy, Spain, Ger­many, Sweden or Hungary.

For small films coming from small countries like Nepal, European films will remain heavyweight con­tenders. And it’s not that European dominance has always hampered Nepal at the Oscars. Actually Nepal owes a lot to France for its only Oscar short-list, ‘Himalaya’ (which is popularly known here as ‘Cara­van’). ‘Himalaya’, directed by Eric Valli, was a French production and before 2005, countries were only allowed to submit films in their offi­cial language. This barred France from submitting the film, which had Tibetan and Nepali languages, as its own entry. So to apply for Oscars, the production company was forced to register it from Nepal—a country submitting a film for the first time. In 1999, Valli was already a reputed documentary filmmaker and had been nominated for an Oscar seven years before. That led to the film’s recognition during the voting and its eventual nomination.

Thus we don’t deserve to bask in the glory of ‘Himalaya’, and call it our nation’s cinematic achievement at the Oscars. We didn’t rightful­ly earn it and such luck won’t be repeated again. If Nepal wants a serious shot at the Oscars, our film development body must play an active role. It should grow up from its passive role of just submitting films. Our films need right amount of promotional funding to make them competitive. It will take tre­mendous amount of PR and theatri­cal screenings for the voting jury to actually value our film.

These goals are to be achieved in the long run. In the meantime we need a national film funding system that extends Nepali films’ global outreach and grooms filmmaking talent. There is no shortage of tal­ent here. Missing are programs that help local directors make art house movies and guide them to brand Nepali films in big league film fes­tivals like Venice (where White Sun premiered). Until and unless we have more Min Bahadur Bhams and Deepak Rauniyars, Oscars would remain a pipedream! o

 There’s an expression in liter­ary circles called the “writ­ers’ writer”. This is someone whose work is highly admired/ talked about among other writers and yet he/she may be relatively unknown to the general public. The same expression can be bor­rowed in the case of films, and for directors in particular. Speak­ing of modern Hindi cinema, one director who deserves the label of “directors’ director” is Sriram Raghavan, the 55-year-old writer/ director of thrillers. His works enjoy cult following among aspir­ing filmmakers and film nerds but he has never been able to bask in global fame like Anurag Kashyap, nor is he much-talked about like Vishal Bhardhwaj, Dibakar Baner­jee or Neeraj Pandey. Raghavan’s limited appeal owes to his sticking to his niche of thriller/ suspense. With the exception of the spy-thriller ‘Agent Vinod’, all of his films seem to take place in the same world, where ordinary lives are thrown asunder by macabre crimes and moral decay. Two of his films —‘Ek Hasina Thi’ and ‘Bad­lapur’—are revenge flicks. And the cult favorite ‘Johnny Gaddaar’ is a racy pulp thriller about a man who digs himself a rabbit hole as he tries to conceal his crimes.

His latest film ‘Andhadhun’ (styl­ized as AndhaDhun) is filled with his trademark touches and I am happy to report that it’s a supe­rior companion piece to ‘Johnny Gaddaar’, in the sense that it’s a plot-driven film thriving on slow and naturally built taut moments. The film does not bother about fabricating suspense through mys­tery and the structure isn’t that of a whodunit. The audience is rather allowed to play God.

Raghavan understands that if viewers know everything about the characters while the characters know nothing about each other, it makes for a more participative viewing. We hold their secrets and have a larger context to feel amused or scared, even when these characters exhibit most ordi­nary of gestures.

The film’s title can be inter­preted in two ways. Literally, it translates as ‘reckless’ or ‘rash’, and figuratively it means a ‘blind tune’. It’s a clever title to a story that blends both these elements. We have a blind pianist (Ayush­mann Khurrana) whose talent makes him a novelty at a Mumbai bar. Things look bright for him: he has a budding romance with the bar-owner (Radhika Apte), and he hopes to put together enough money to strike it big in London. Then, one eventful day, in search of extra cash he knocks the door of an apartment belonging to a washed-up Bolly­wood actor of the 70s (Anil Dha­wan), who wants the pianist to play a private concert for him and his wife (Tabu) on their marriage anni­versary. But the day that promised a gentle, jazz-filled romantic cele­bration shifts to an uncomfortable and nervous frenzy.

Raghavan orchestrates the film like a seasoned music conductor. He begins at a leisurely pace, put­ting Khurrana’s reputation as the Hugh Grant of Hindi small-town romantic comedies to good use. The opening plays out like a fluffy, breezy romantic comedy. As the normalcy settles in, he instantly disrupts it with a gut-wrenching punch. This contrast escalates in intensity and events pile up and the director pumps his composition with a shot of nervous energy and unpredictability.

Khurrana’s performance helps the protagonist remain likeable even when he ventures into anti-hero territory. He softens and hardens believably, and keeps his morality intact. His transforma­tion is not as pessimistic as that of protagonists in Raghavan’s ear­lier films. Likewise, Tabu pulls off different shades of her character: as a noir-ish seductress, grieving wife and a master manipulator. She’s downright sympathetic and also genuinely scary. Radhika Apte is in a short but effective role. Other actors like Anil Dhawan, Manav Vij, Zakir Hussain, Chhaya Kadam and Ashwini Kalsekar are all given their own moments and dialogues to shine.

‘Andhadhun’ is proof that nobody knows how to spin the thriller genre better than Sriram Raghavan. The film not only has the marks of a mas­ter storyteller but also of a serious fanboy who injects 80s Bollywood nostalgia with the sensibilities of classic American and European films from Alfred Hitchcock and Louis Malle. I personally hope ‘Andhadhun’ succeeds in giving Sriram Raghavan the recognition he duly deserves.

It’s ironic how a film with an overarching title like ‘Katha Kathmandu’ turns out to be an anthology of loosely connected trivialities that is utterly unrepresentative of the spirit of Kathmandu. Author and TV producer Sangita Shrestha, who directs this film, tries to stitch together three stories with thematic fabrics of lust, love and life. But her lens is so shallow and detached from social consciousness that she ends up looking at Kathmandu and its people from a single dimension, inspired as she is, more by mainstream movies than real life.

These three stories feature a super-model (Priyanka Karki) exploited by her drug-dealer boyfriend (Pramod Agrahari), a teenage college romance between a college hottie (Sandhya KC) and a geek (Sanjog Koirala), and two terminally-ill heart patients (Prekshya Adhikari and Ayushman Joshi), who, at the cusp of death, don’t fail to cash in on little moments of joy.

All three are blends of broad-stroke characters and situations we’ve already seen in so many popular movies before. The darker side of the fashion world, filled with promiscuous models and lecherous men, made me feel as if I had walked into a Madhur Bhandarkar film. Also, the track of budding romance amid illness reeks of ‘The Fault in Our Stars’. Writer-director Shrestha never subverts these familiarities and plays them out predictably. She carries a very generalist assumption of drug addicts, making her actors rub their noses constantly. Other stereotypes are also played up. One character wears big frames and has a forced stammer just to look socially awkward and enough to make Rohit Mehra from ‘Koi Mil Gaya’ feel proud.

The film’s writing doesn’t do any favors to the actors. Characters are painted either black or white. Pramod Agrahari tears into his sadistic role with one-note intensity. Priyanka Karki is too zoned out in the role of a victim, who gets thrashed around by both Agrahari’s character and Sangita Shrestha’s conceited plot tricks, employed throughout to gain shock value. Shrestha fails to recognize that to land a good payoff you first need a good setup. The performances from young actors Sandhya KC, Sanjog Koirala, Ayushman Joshi and Prekshya Adhikari aren’t worthy enough to make viewers care about them.

At many points in ‘Katha Kathmandu’ characters will vent their anger at Kathmandu for crushing their dreams and thrusting their lives into a whirlwind of misery. These outbursts barely make us care about them or to relate their struggle to the contemporary mood and culture of modern Kathmandu. The film’s stilted in its glossy design and flat cinematic aesthetics. Lujaw Singh’s camerawork lacks the poignancy to capture the city’s texture. We stay mainly indoors: in brightly-lit clean apartments, expensive looking colleges and hospitals.

‘Katha Kathmandu’ has come one week after ‘Intu Mintu Londonma’, a film that also had a female director (Renesha Rai Bantawa). Although ‘Katha Kathmandu’ has slightly better performances, both films’ central shortcoming is the same: They are more produced than directed. They adhere strictly to the trendy filmmaking conventions. Money is poured to create lavish and rich looking production design, but what about the content? With their films, Rai and Shrestha have added no new dimension that could’ve questioned the status quo of Nepali films. Their initial efforts have turned out to be so bland that it will be difficult to keep a keen interest in what they have to offer in the coming days.

‘Intu Mintu Londonma’ is true to the spirit of the playground rhyme that inspired its title. The romantic drama basically imagines a make-believe childlike world and just like the rhyme, makes no sense at all. We get por­celains as protagonists in Ishan aka Intu and Meera aka Mintu, who mostly act cute and funny but their conversation is neither interesting nor memorable. Whatever they talk and emote, is so dull and irrel­evant that watching them is akin to spending time babysitting two annoying five-year-olds.

London-based Ishan (Dhiraj Magar) meets Meera (Samragyee RL Shah), the daughter of Nepal’s Ambassador to the UK, at a pub where he plays with his band and also works as a manager. After they are introduced by a common friend, Ishan casually points out to Meera that they have the same coat. Meera gets offended. Later when she sees Ishan put a Nepali topi on an ex-Gurkha patron, she smiles at him, hinting maybe she’s into nationalist dudes and not into someone who wants to elbow in by saying ‘same pinch’. I don’t know.

They meet again, this time on a train when Meera overhears some­one singing in Nepali. She follows the voice and finds Ishan. Their romance builds over a weekend of sanitized hiking and sightseeing. Next morning they go their sepa­rate ways. They lose contact only to meet yet again at a mutual friend’s wedding. The lapse in communica­tion in between their weekend trip and the friend’s wedding is never cleared. Nevertheless, they restart from where they had left.

Soon, Meera’s father (played by journo Dil Bhushan Pathak) gets wind of their closeness. He doesn’t approve of Ishan and to keep from things going south, abruptly announces Meera’s engagement to Major Akash (Saruk Tamrakar) of Nepal Army, son of a close family friend, and takes his daughter to Nepal. The rest of the film takes place in Nepal with the backdrop of Meera’s wedding, where she’s conflicted between choosing her own life partner or the one chosen by her family.

Seasoned choreographer Rene­sha Rai Bantawa, in what is her first directorial venture, outshines in production design and dance. There is too much opulence at offer. Characters are dressed like runway models and Sailendra D. Karki’s cinematography doesn’t shy away to capture the London’s postcard perfect locations. But as one tries to look at the film beyond its cosmetic glare, Rai’s direction falls flat. From her inability to make her young actors internalize their characters to mishandling of dra­matic scenes, she still has to evolve as a storyteller.

The central performances from newcomer Dhiraj Magar and Sam­ragyee RL Shah are poorer than the material at hand. Magar has that Joseph Gordon-Levitt boyishness about him but his pleasing looks is unable to cover up his lacklus­ter acting. His co-star, Shah, on the other hand, is six films older and still finding it hard to peel off her pin-up girl image. It’s time she overhauled her career graph and started looking for projects that would make her come out of the world of bubblegum romances. And Saruk Tamrakar, who makes an abrupt entry post-interval, maintains a stiff body posture to appear like an army man.

‘Intu Mintu Londonma’ is a close relative of ‘Kaira’ and ‘Lilly Billy’ that released earlier this year. These films might have been shot abroad and much care given to make their actors look pretty, yet the story engine is second-rate and rusty. Even with modest commer­cial success, if the Nepali main­stream romantic films keep deliv­ering such disappointments, the viewers would soon stop showing any interest in the genre.

The cinematic world of Anurag Kashyap is normally inhabited by criminals, gangsters, cor­rupt politicians, addicts and serial killers. So his latest film ‘Manmar­ziyaan’ has been pointed out by many as that moment in his career when he came out of his comfort zone to direct a romantic come­dy—a genre so mainstream and overwrought by Kashyap’s stan­dards that nobody would’ve put the director’s name and the genre in the same sentence. But the film isn’t an outright departure, with Kashyap still man­aging to put his trademark stamp of unfiltered and unpredictable chaos on Kanika Dhillon’s screenplay. And this is all done over Amit Trive­di’s hip and pulsating soundtrack.

Set in Amritsar, ‘Manmarzi­yaan’ introduces us to lovers Rumi (Taapsee Pannu) and Vicky (Vicky Kaushal). The film opens with the Mohawk-donning Vicky, as he leaps through terraces to tryst with Rumi at her house. Their small town sees them as a bad influence on their children.

Rumi is a headstrong, outspoken girl, a former hockey player no less. Vicky is a freewheeling bloke, harboring a dream of becoming a superstar DJ. But he is a confused guy, who can easily hop from one passion to another in the blink of an eye.

Their families aren’t antagonists, so much as they are their own ene­mies. As circumstances would have it, Rumi demands a more serious relationship from Vicky, while Vicky gets cold feet. Rumi gives him multiple chances but Vicky fizzles out every time.

In this mix enters Robbie (Abhisekh Bachchan), an NRI banker from England. He is some­one who’ll have mothers swooning over him to marry their daugh­ters. But Robbie falls hard for Rumi the moment a matchmaker shows him her photograph for an arranged marriage. The film then circles around Rumi, who is torn between her first real love, Vicky, and Robbie, who seems to have all the qualities of a perfect husband.

The plot isn’t original. Many view­ers will think of it as an update of 1999’s ‘Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam’ or 1983’s ‘Woh 7 Din’. The freshness therefore comes from the complex characters that populate this film. Rumi for sure is an unlikely leading lady in a Bollywood film. Taapsee Pannu is given lot to do in this role that demands more than just being a simple object in a tug of war between two men.

Pannu pulls off Rumi with such panache that the viewers are able to clearly fathom her character’s mental mess. She shares an elec­tric chemistry with an unrecog­nizable Vicky Kaushal. Kaushal completely disappears in the life of his character, giving him energy and vulnerability. And then there’s the master stroke of casting Abhisekh Bachchan as Robbie, a silent and brooding fellow, and easily likeable.

At a staggering length of 2 hours and 37 minutes, ‘Manmarziyaan’ feels a tad bit too long for a roman­tic film. But Kashyap paces it with cracking music from Amit Trivedi that provides a smooth rhythm. He has lots of fun with the genre and time and again gives us such dynamic visual storytelling cues, for instance, the recurring appear­ance of twin sisters whenever Rumi’s having an internal dilemma. Kashyap’s combination of skills is at display here.

From hammering his actors to fit the mold of their characters to his technically crafted direction, a less worthy director would’ve taken the same material and given it a more regular treatment. But Kashyap takes the familiar and gives it a new toss. Watching ‘Manmarziyaan’ makes you feel it’s a film from a director in top form.

Apart from two or three gen­uinely scary heart-in-your-mouth moments, the ‘The Conjuring’ spin-off ‘The Nun’ is low on plot and even lower on atmo­sphere and tension. This is a period horror replete with gothic imagery and Catholic mysticism. But the gothic aesthetics is sparsely effec­tive and mostly bland while the uncooked screenplay from Gary Dauberman (the noted writer of ‘It’ and ‘Annabelle: Creation’) is full of subpar ideas that try to fill the entire run-time with information dumping instead of invoking any emotional hook points. The attempt is to tell an origin story of the demonic nun who has made several appearances across ‘The Conjuring’ movie universe. This film traces her roots back to 1952, to a remote Christian monas­tery in Romania. As the film opens, two nuns pass through the monas­tery’s dark hallway and stop right outside a sinister looking door. Seconds later an unseen creature attacks both of them.

The news of their death travels to the Vatican where a board of high ranking clergymen decides to send Father Burke (Demian Bichir) to investigate the spooky activities in the monastery. Father Burke is advised to recruit young Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga), who’s training to be a nun and has some strange psy­chic abilities. Together they reach the haunted monastery with the sole intent of knowing about the evil spirit lurking inside the place and casting her out.

The problem with ‘The Nun’ is that director Corin Hardy resorts to old-school horror trickery of jump scares and loud background scores. He and his writer make the cardinal sin in horror: revealing too much. The monster that haunts this pic­ture makes repetitive appearances and overexploitation of her pres­ence slowly wanes her impact from being terrorizing to tedious. There’s a sense of haste and incompleteness as the story moves forward in ran­dom directions.

Bichir and Farmiga, the two leads of the film, show no integ­rity to their loosely defined char­acters. Their outside snooping to unravel the mystery feels mechan­ical and fails to make us care about their ghost hunting. Despite this, there’s one well executed sequence involving a priest trapped inside a coffin, which hints of what the movie could’ve been if the makers were open to inventive horror tricks.

When ‘The Conjuring’ first came out, it paved the way for medium-budget horror films with high sense of scare and thrills. Its religious narrative and period setting were refreshing for hor­ror audiences who were getting tired of special effects horror. In a short time it established itself as a brand, resulting in byproducts like ‘The Nun’ that tarnishes the image of the original by committing the mistakes the original one so care­fully sidestepped.

Some movies are so forgettable, you have zero memory of them. ‘The Nun’ falls in the same cate­gory. It’s a quick cash grab from the studio that’s feeding off the loyalty of fans of the original film by giving them a second-rate entertainer. This contributes nothing substantial to the overall universe of ‘The Con­juring’. The only thing left to do is wait for James Wan (the creator and director of the original) to rejuve­nate the series.

 ‘Stree’ takes a small town urban myth about a mysterious female ghoul to deliver a hor­ror comedy packaged with colorful characters, textured dialogues and good laughs that don’t let the movie down even when the material gets too trite and over the top.

Helmed by newcomer director Amar Kaushik, it is a comedy first and a horror film second. It may simmer a lot to find its footing in the first half, but when its narrative pad­dles finally kick in, it is successful in pulling off the rare feat of marrying horror with comedy.

Every year a weeklong festival is held in the village of Chanderi. For quite some time, this very festival has become the hunting ground for a strange creature that comes at night and abducts the village men. The village folks are so terrified with these mysterious disappear­ances that all houses feature a spell to ward off the evil spirit, who they have simply named Stree (‘The Lady’). Vicky (Rajkummar Rao), a local tailor, rubbishes them as mere superstition.

Even when his best buddies are spending their days speculating on the sightings of Stree, Vicky’s more concerned about the reappearance of an out-of-towner beauty (Shrad­dha Kapoor), who only visits Chan­deri during the festival.

Vicky is sure that this time he’ll muster up courage to express his real feelings for her when she approaches him to design a par­ticular dress for her. But Vicky’s romantic pursuits are cut short when one of his friends becomes the latest victim of Stree. He then seeks the help of Hindi pulp novel publisher Rudra (Pankaj Tripathi), a local expert on paranormal activi­ties, to find a way to permanently get rid of Stree.

For the most part, Stree relies on humor through comedic ban­ters. Rao and Tripathi, who shared a terrific chemistry in the dark comedy ‘Newton’, are in top form. Rao is lovable and easily switches back and forth between a gooey eyed lover boy and a terrified ghost buster. Tripathi is the arche­typical wise old guy who has all the answers.

His character has the expositional function of spelling out the finer narrative details about the ghost. A less capable actor may have made the character sound bland and information heavy, but not Trip­athi. He brings a spirited novelty with his conversational delivery that uses Hindi peppered with funnily pronounced English words, a line of tacky old Bollywood song on the ready for any odd situation. Equally effective is Shraddha Kapoor in her role that keeps you guessing about her character’s background and motives.

The film has so much to rave about but it also has many things not going for itself. The initial thirty to forty minutes are marred by pointless songs and lack of narra­tive direction. Some scenes where the tension could’ve been milked for greater comedic effects don’t land properly. But because the film doesn’t take itself too seriously and keeps the affair breezy and light hearted, it’s easy to follow. It right­fully finds rhythm as it goes along and delivers on the promise of the premise.

Stree is a broad comedy but doesn’t take its cinematic liberties for granted to display VFX mayhem to whisk cheap humor and ham-fisted horror thrills. It’s genuinely smart and effectively amiable horror comedy that will certainly inspire more movies in this genre.