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Friday, April 26, 2024
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BOLLYWOOD CLICK
EDITOR'S PICK
`Click` a melange of intended terror, unintended humour (IANS Review Rating: **)
If you can accept Shreyas Talpade as a womanizing glamorous photographer who clicks with the ladies, so to speak, and Sneha Ullal, then the underlining theme of love-on-the-prowl in afterlife is chilling in spurts.
Director Sangeeth Sivan, who had earlier carved a comic slant for himself with Kyaa Kool Hain Hum, displays a penchant for projecting a mood of ominous foreboding into the finely lit frames.
The camera (T. Ramji) is impeccably mood-oriented. The idyllic Goa outdoors and the neat spacious artistically designed interiors are used intelligently to create a sense of horrific disorder under the commodious elegant surfaces.
Sandeep Chowta`s reined-in background score is another asset to the mood of underlying foreboding, though the songs, done as annoying set pieces with autopilot choreography, are like molar surgery in the middle of a trying day.
The sound design mercifully precludes startling noises and creaking doors. Like Ram Gopal Varma`s Bhoot, Click focuses on finding the centre of the terror in ordinary circumstances.
If only portions of the plot was not so hard to digest. Moving on an age-old premise for horror cinema where the protagonist`s past trespasses catch up with him in chilling infinity, Click creates a melange of intended terror and unintended humour.
Talpade (somewhat miscast) is the not-so-fashionable fashion photographer whose camera begins to capture spirits.
The feeling of something-out-there is well-developed. But the gruesome pre-denouement gang rape and murder are not just out of place but done with unpardonable half-heartedness.
Some of the hero`s trysts with the spook, such as the sequence where he climbs down a fire escape with the spirit in hot pursuit, are spine-chilling. The dying moments where Avi`s past guilt literally rides on his shoulder and apparently for the rest of his life, are a terrifying representation of guilt, though the rest of the film is too flighty to carry the existential burden.
While Shreyas is effective in the traumatized moments, his two co-stars are listless. Blessedly this shiver giver seems original.
And we can`t fault the film for cracking the horror genre with a basic amount of finesse.
From one of India`s smartest film-makers, Sangeeth Sivan, comes Click, 2009`s
most bone-chilling film. They say that pictures always tell a story. The true
story, Click is the story of a young photographer and his girlfriend. He takes
beautiful pictures and yet when they`re printed they hide a secret. A secret
that is so dark, terrifying and menacing that he hides it from his girlfriend.
A secret from his past that if revealed, threatens to ruin not only his life
but that of his family, friends and loved ones. A secret that comes from a
world that`s different from ours.
Pritish Nandy communications and Play Entertainment bring you the scariest,
darkest, most blood-curling film of the year, Click. What happens when the
spirit world looks you straight in the eye and tells you to run of die?
