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Thursday, April 18, 2024
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BOLLYWOOD AATMA
EDITOR'S PICK
`Aatma`
- an `eerie`-isistible horror drama (IANS Movie Review)
Rating: ***
All of us - men and women, husband and wives, adults and children, have to live
with our fears. Sometimes we have to die with them. That`s where trouble starts
in Suparn Verma`s smartly-written, nimbly-executed shiver-giver which,
blessedly, doesn`t lapse into a gore fest... At least not until the last few
reels when the body count begins to pile up faster than we can say, "Aatma".
By the end of this short-and-slick and `eerie`-isistible horror drama, I did
begin to get the feeling that the script, which had so far moved at a
symmetrical even and smooth pace, kills too many people. Life is short. Shorter
if you have a dead spouse determined to wrangle your only child`s security by
legal or other-worldly means.
Early on we see Nawazuddin as Bipasha Basu`s brutal husband twisting her arm,
hurling her to the floor, hurting and wounding her pride and her body. Domestic
violence is a serious crime. It can get nasty and ugly on screen when put into
the wrong directorial hands. Director Verma doesn`t succumb to sleaze. He
creates an inner-belly of monstrous disturbances underneath the smooth normal
face.
At the top, the movie displays polished surfaces smiling, benignly into our
faces. The director makes telling use of suburban spaces. The marble floors and
the freshly-painted walls, the imported kitchen appliances, eye-catching
furniture and the luminous lighting, all seem to suggest that life is beautiful.
The fissures and aberrations make themselves apparent through the fabric of
normalcy until we are left gawking at the gaping wounds that fester under the
smooth surface.
At heart, "Aatma" is a custody battle for a child, a "Kramer vs.
Kramer", where one of the parents is dead. Imagine if Meryl Streep was dead
and she wanted to take her son away from Dustin Hoffman. Nawazuddin makes a
scary Streep.
Verma shoots the chilling premise with minimum ostentation. Ironically the
husband, as played by the stark and startling Nawazuddin, is frighteningly
demoniacal even when shown alive. In a scene that progresses effortlessly from
the ordinary to the ominous Nawazuddin after losing custody battle in the
judge`s chamber, threatens the judge and thumbs his nose at any law that
separates him from his daughter. Here, and anywhere else, living or dead,
Nawazuddin`s omnipresence is a terrifying prospect.
Verma makes austere use of terror tactics. Mirror images that don`t match up
with the people and landscape outside the mirror, a ball rolling down an empty
school corridor, and in the frightening finale, Nawazuddin leading his daughter
by her hand down a railway track, Verma`s images are vivid and spine-tingling.
He uses space to convey distances that stretch into hearts filled with
emptiness.
Tragically, the terror runs out of steam mid-way and the end-game doesn`t have the edge-of-the-seat scream-stifling impact that the rest of the film leads us to expect. Nonetheless, Aatma is one of the scariest films in recent times because it doesn`t try to be scary. The chills come from the normal gleaming surfaces. Suparn Verma keeps the proceedings quiet, subdued and uniformly ominous. He gets able support from his editor Hemal Kothari, who gives a tightly-wound but nonetheless baggy and freewheeling feel to the footage, and from the cinematographer Sophie Winquvist, who makes Bipasha and her world look pretty, though not in a picture-postcard way.
"Aatma" features some talented actors in the cast. Shernaz Patel and
Jaideeep Ahlawat get into their characters` skin without doing anything here
that takes their reputation forward. The show belongs to Bipasha all the way.
After "Raaz", she once again carries the scare-fest on her shapely
shoulders, feeling every minute of the single mother`s terror and horror as her
sadistic husband`s malevolent soul takes over her life.
Bipasha seems to get better with every film.
The movie follows Maya (Bipasha Basu), a single mother that has managed to escape the cycle of from her husband (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) after his death. Her sense of peace is shattered when she begins to discover that her husband is possessing their daughter (Doyel Dhawan) with the intent of causing the child`s death and taking her with him to his own world (of the dead).
Reliance Trends promotes film Aatma Stills