Movie Review: Pari (2018)

Source: IMDb

Pari is a question mark on the sensibilities of childhood fables. It is far removed from a world of binaries, where the good is puritan white and the evil is satanic black. Its story juxtaposes such fantastic characters as jinns into the real world, grey and pulsating with emotions. It humanises the feared, making us feel for the numbed, making us realise frame after frame that there is life within those without it.

The film starts off with a dewy mise en scene and maintains it throughout the two hours of runtime, possibly signifying the unpredictability of the unknown hiding behind a pall of rainy mist. But the suspense does not linger for long. The overuse of auditory jump-scares—which are nothing but amplifications of minuscule diegetic sounds—makes for a heart-wrenching first impression and an indifferent last one. Indian audiences have had enough of those shrieks, heavy breaths and sudden jerks since the Ramsay days. What’s so different about Pari then?

Its ability to immerse the viewers. The storyboard comes alive with breadth, intensity and sensuousness. Each character of the story is written prolifically. The viewers get immersed into the lives of the characters. Also, there is liberal use of blood, gores and moans, adding to the grotesque sensuousness of the film. But do two hours suffice for such extrapolations? No; and that’s where the film’s greatest threat and opportunity lies. Pari can be developed into a deftly edited TV/web series. And who better to helm such a project than its director Prosit Roy, who co-directed 2020's critically acclaimed web series Pataal Lok.

Finally, Pari ends up both as a mishmash and a mismatch. It’s a mishmash because it dangles in between three storylines while keeping just enough sensible headroom to interlink them and begins to lack coherence towards the end due to its repetitive nature. It’s a mismatch too, and in a positive light, because it challenges the status quo of Indian horror hitherto dominated by gothic themes of romantic couples facing the wrath of the supernatural on honeymoon. The greatest twist here could be the romance between a human and a djinn. And what might come out of their union? Greyness, Pari’s USP.

Ending with the beginning: Suitor Arnab (Parambrata Chatterjee)'s family accidentally runs over a mama djinn on a rainy evening. Enter daughter djinn (Anushka Sharma). What happens when the suitor and daughter djinn are stuck under the same roof? Love, sex, or dhoka? Pretty much everything. Watch the film and find out for yourself.