Horror

SUNKESARI

CAST: Reecha Sharma, Rabindra Jha, Sunny Dhakal, Lauren Lofberg

DIRECTION: Arpan Thapa

1 Star

 

Director Arpan Thapa and lead­ing lady Reecha Sharma would want us to believe that with their latest project ‘Sunkesari’ they have a lot at stake and that they have defied filmmakers’ reluctance to tap into the most unpopular genre in Nepali cinema: horror. But to think of ‘Sunkesari’ as a path-breaking genre piece would be a grand error of judgment. It is so dull and ineffective that it rightly earns a place in the can alongside other trashy wannabe horror films like ‘Awaran’, ‘Ek Din Ek Raat’, ‘Zhi­grana’ and ‘Vigilante 3D’. As in the aforementioned movies, ‘Sunkesari’ deploys the same textbook tech­niques of unmotivated jump scares, swinging doors, sliding blankets and heavy background scores to scare audience. But there is no convincing story to hold them all together.

 

The entire film is set in Austra­lia. When we first meet the titu­lar character Sunkesari (Reecha Sharma), she’s curled up in her bed, going through a bad breakup. She appears depressed, maybe slightly suicidal and utterly unsocial. Then her overtly concerned friend walks in, gives her a few minutes of pep talk and finally makes a suggestion to help her move on. And what does she suggest? That Sunkesari spends some time away at a large tourist mansion which hasn’t offi­cially opened up and where prob­ably she’d be the only guest. Good friends (unless they are sadists) would perhaps not give you such ludicrous ideas, especially not if you are emotionally unstable.

 

But this film stays outside the sphere of common sense and main­tains a level of brain-deadness that is hard to cover up. So Sunkesari, who actually needs to be on a 24-hour suicide watch, goes to the man­sion. There she’s welcomed by a butler, Yadav (Rabindra Jha). The only working staff of the mansion, Yadav, we’re told, is an illegal Nepali immigrant. Why anyone would trust an illegal immigrant with no work experience to run a multi-million property is never mentioned.

 

After that, as is typical of the haunted-house story template, Sunkesari and Yadav are tormented by creepy noises, doors that shut on their own, loud banging at night and ghostly figures. Later, a young cou­ple on honeymoon (Sunny Dhakal and Lauren Lofberg) checks in. Their arrival only aggravates the situation. Also from then on the film turns into a ham-fisted display of bad acting and direction.

 

There is no love and regard for the genre in Arpan Thapa’s direction. His carelessness is evident in many places but mostly while trying to balance dread and anticipation, which are the most important ingre­dients of any horror film. Devoting an entire parallel comic track on Rabindra Jha shows how desperate Thapa is to make it mainstream. But his decision misfires.

 

Good production design and camera work can never conceal a bad screenplay. Thapa’s writing is unfocused and sketchy. It’s strange that the investors backed such a poor story. One of those backers is Reecha Sharma herself. I last saw Sharma hamming it up in ‘Kohalpur Express’, in what I consider the worst performance of her career. She’s more bearable in ‘Sunkesari’ but her character’s shallowness and passivity limits her to dead-eyed act­ing with much sulking and staring. The rest of the cast is forgettable.

 

‘Sunkesari’ is an amateur horror film lacking finesse, both in terms of storytelling and technical craft. The film is a lesson for other would-be horror filmmakers to look beyond outdated model of cheap thrills and jump scares.