Is setting up a creepy atmosphere with fear writ on all faces enough to tell a horror story?
Anup Bhandari who writes, directs, acts, sings and pens lyrics, gets his atmospherics right by plonking the viewer on a lonely, rainy road surrounded by jungles. A mother and child in a car all by themselves. The kid in a mask, it’s a party mood. The car breaks down. The mother steps out.
Horror follows. The titles begin.
So far, so good.
And then Bhandari gets lost in the jungle. The jungle is consistent, the camera (William David) unrelentingly dark and shot between tall, foreboding trees. Somewhere between the trees lies Kamarottu, a fictional village.
A sprawling, desolate house belonging to the Gambhira family that hasn’t been opened for years. A younger brother returns after decades wanting to open the locked family mansion to conduct the marriage of his daughter Panna (Neetha Ashok). Stiff patriarch Janardhan Gambhir (Madhusudan Rao) resists it. There’s a superstition that opening the house would unleash horror on everybody around.
A path of no return through the jungle, nobody has come out of it alive.
Janardhan’s missing son Sanju (Nirup Bhandari) returns “from London” at the same time as the family that’s landed in Kamarottu for a marriage. A cop is found dead. Missing children turn up dead. A petty smuggler up to shady business. Another named Fakhru who has 11 children with no full stop on the way. A school master called Lawrence chanting the Hanuman Chalisa.
And a new inspector Vikrant Rona (Kichcha Sudeepa) arrives in a poorly lit ship with his little daughter. Who was in the ghost ship that looked like it came out of Pirates of the Caribbean? Who were the bad men Vikrant battled aboard to show his cool fighting skills? Why would anybody bring a kid to this place of death and darkness and leave her alone for long stretches?
It’s the beginning of the don’t-ask-questions phase as query after query will arise since there’s nothing else to keep the viewer rivetted.
Nobody knows what exactly is happening in that dark screen up there. At interval point there’s a question mark even over Vikrant Rona. Is he really the replacement police inspector?
After more bodies strung up trees and deep down in wells, some nervous comedy that’s not one whit witty, an unlikely romance between supposed cousins, annoying father-daughter scenes and a lullaby between Vikrant and daughter, at least three main characters emerge as different from who they claim to be.
It’s a straight revenge story, of family loss and children who’ve been abused, now grown up to wreak havoc in the village that gave them so much grief. There is poignancy in caste discrimination and mistreatment of children.
But the straight story is told in such a convoluted, cranky manner that almost all of it is disjointedly incomprehensible. It is topped with such dark photography that to make out who’s doing what and why is a long guessing game. Which is lamentable because Vikrant Rona arrived in theatres with so much curiosity around it.
With a strange resemblance to Jaaved Jaaferi, Kichcha Sudeepa has the required bulging muscles and the swagger.  Â
If you like counting trees in the dark, go for it. Vikrant will even sing you a lullaby. Whether in Kannada or Hindi, you’ll go zzzzz.
Watch Vikrant Rona Trailer:
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