Cinemaah

In the interim, Farhan Akhtar has zoomed up the Bollywood pyramid, Annu Kapoor has, sort of, missed the movie bus, and director Anand Surapur remained dormant.

The film could have been a satire on the Western world’s fascination with Indian spiritualism, that allows for the proliferation of fake—and some genuine—gurus, but it is too stolid to be funny.

Adi Contractor (Akhtar displaying no Parsi-ness) is a glib production coordinator, who can manage anything, which makes him a go-to guy for film units. When he gets an assignment from an Italian artist, to find a fakir for an art installation, Adi jumps at the chance to venture into foreign territory and also put away some money for studying in the US.

 His trip to Benaras proves futile, it is a Mumbai fixer—more connected than Adi himself—who finds an alcoholic painter Sattar (Annu Kapoor), who is capable of burying himself in the sand for several hours—which is what the Italian gallery wants. With the help of his former girlfriend, he transforms Sattar into a saffron-robed sadhu, and drags him to Venice.

In the art gallery, Sattar is buried in sand with only his joined hands above the ground; the foreigners are fascinated by his feat of breath control. All Sattar wants in return is “daaru.” Adi comes across as an exploitative creep, who constantly bullies Sattar, so that he can flog his skill to others for more money.

The film is supposedly based on a true story, but seems to thrive on the stereotypes of gullible whites in search of spiritual short cuts, and Indian jugaad cons like Adi who take advantage of their ignorance.

There is no graph to the characters of Adi and Sattar, however, so the film just goes into a rut after a point, and stays there.

If a girl prefers to go to a dank-looking chateau with a broken swing in the grounds for a romantic getaway, the man should have second thoughts; otherwise a laughably bad horror film like Amavas can ensue.

Surprisingly, the suburban moviehall had a respectable number of people come to watch this movie (directed by Bhushan Patel), some of whom sporadically went ‘Wooooooh’ because the film had such few scares and just the threat of a “ladies bhoot” haunting the above-mentioned castle in Europe.

Karan (Sachiin J. Joshi) takes his girlfriend Ahana (Nargis Fakhri) to the family’s summer home, that has been shut for eight years, after an ‘incident’ that has left him mentally disturbed and under the care of a shrink (Mona Singh)—none of which Ahana knows.

In the conveyor belt horror films made in Bollywood, people idiotically wander around dark rooms, ignore spooky sounds, and loudly declare that they don’t believe in ghosts. Meanwhile, white curtains billow, suits of armour clang and a creepy servant (Ali Asghar) hovers around. Who cleans the massive place, polishes the metal and launders the curtains, you wonder, because till the intermission point nothing much happen. Karan and Ahana sing a few songs and have many nightmares. Ahana also discovers that there was Sameer (Vivan Bhatena) and Maya (Navneet Kaur Dhillon) in Karan’s past.

The film picks up in the last half hour or so, when the rest of the cast assembles for some supernatural hijinks and the body count rises. No great acting chops are required in a film like this, but Nargis Fakhri with her pale make-up and screechy manner of asking daft questions is more frightening than the ghost.