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Wednesday, April 24, 2024
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HOLLYWOOD THE FOREST
EDITOR'S PICK
Rating: ***
Charlie Chaplin once said, "All I need to make a comedy is a park, a
policeman and a pretty girl." Debutante feature film director Ashvin Kumar
applies the same principle for a horror film, replacing the park with a forest
and throwing in the woman`s husband, a policeman`s son, and a guard, and binds
them all with a man-eating leopard.
Though "The Forest" is full of cliches of its genre, there are
elements that one can really cheer for in this low-budget, independent film.
A couple, Radhan (Nandana Sen) and Pritam (Ankur Vikal), come to a jungle resort
in the Kumau Valley. Here they find an old friend Abhishek (Jaaved Jaaferi), who
is a cop in the region and lives with his son. As they frolic around the forest,
trying to sort dormant issues between one another, a man-eating leopard is
readying for the kill.
In the 1952 film "The Bad And The Beautiful" directed by Vincente
Minnelli, filmmakers realised that what actually scares people in a horror film
is not horrible creatures, but the fear of something lurking in the dark. Horror
lies not in what is visible, but in that which is not and the fear of what it
can do to you.
That is exactly what Kumar does to good effect, using shadows and sounds instead
of the actual leopard who barely occupies five minutes of screen time.
The cinematography of the film, especially the shots of the jungle taken by
Naresh and Rajesh Bedi, is breathtaking. And the actors do a fairly good job of
what they are offered.
Yet, there`s hardly anything that comes as a surprise as the film panders to
known cliches of the horror and thriller genre. Thus, the leopard becomes only
secondary to the horror the characters` own inner selves, struggling against
themselves and those closest to them. That this is not done in an overbearing
manner makes one comfortable in the cliches.
The major drawbacks of the film are the many lapses in writing, which forgets to
close some loopholes or better explain others.
There is a track of an ash-wearing mysterious woman which does not find a
logical conclusion. There`s even a scene where Radha sees the reflection of a
woman in the mirror. The scene, it seems, was added just to lend more chill to
the film and like a few other scenes, seems completely disjointed from the
story.
The leopard is shown to be swift and powerful enough to just carry off people
magically. Agreed that these mythical elements were required to build the
leopard`s character, but a little more attention to detail like the addition of
sound of being pulled in the gap during the person`s disappearance would have
made it that much more believable.
The point of view of the leopard is also done very badly. One of the reasons
that makes the leopard so deadly is his sight which is sharper than that of
humans. To show his vision to be hazy does not make sense.
The typical ending would have been where some or all of the humans, and
definitely the terrorising animal, die. Though there is death, the ending is
sensitive and original as the writer-director does something unexpected yet
believable. This shows the sensitive side of the film whose intention is not
just to thrill, but also raise issues of conservation.
