Durgamati

A horror drama that might have aimed high as per its original but ultimately ends up providing lame horror and loud drama.

Cast – Bhumi Pednekar, Arshad Warsi, Jisshu SenGupta, Mahie Gill, Karan Kapadia

Director – G.Ashok

Plot

The plot opens to show mysterious killings, antique statues being stolen, a politician and a dumb looking CBI chief in an amateurish conversation about nailing another politician Ishwar Prasad (Warsi) for those robberies and using an IAS officer Chanchal Sharma (Bhumi) who happens to be serving a jail sentence.

Then comes in a superfluous looking woman CBI chief (Mahi Gill), an unconvincing looking police chief (Sengupta) and a senseless plot about planting Chanchal in a dilapidated haunted palace which the ultra brave woman keeps exploring alone in the dead of the night in a zombie mode.

Some eerie scenes, ghostly sightings, unnatural happenings and supernatural takeovers later, we have some twists, turns and then a vainglorious climax.

Analysis

Everything right from the word go is wrong!

What is clear right from scene one is a shoddy screenplay, bad direction, lame dialogues and poor production values.The quality of extras used is pathetic, not that they have been able to put to respectable use the able actors they had.

I wonder what goes wrong with the dialogue writers the moment they work on a remake. The dialogues seem downright senseless and out of place and make the actors mouthing them look silly. The humour becomes downright irritating.

When the underlying irritation takes complete control of the mind, there’s no scope of any fear element to creep in. So the horror element is out of question.

Performances

It was sad to see a good actor like Bhumi looking permanently bonked out and mouthing dialogues  in that zombie drawl. By the time she was taken over by her supernatural avatar, we were overtaken by our impatient inner avatars almost trying to bash our own self.

The reason Arshad Warsi  managed to hold fort with a rather unimpressive performance is that he seemed better than others.

Unless I have missed something in my “fast forward” watch, I think Karan Kapadia looked sincere in that tiny role and we should be thankful he didn’t mouth anything over the top.

I would beg to refrain from saying anything about Mahie Gill. I would like to rather pass the blame to the director.

It was director-writer’s Hindi debut but the producers should have an idea what works for Hindi cinema and put in some effort accordingly. How come they failed to see what a disaster this remake was turning into!

Quite intolerable, to put it mildly !