DIRECTOR: Kannan Iyer
CAST: Emraan Hashmi, Konkona Sen Sharma, Kalki Koechlin,
Huma Qureshi, Pavan Malhotra
Rating: ***
The best supernatural movies are rooted in the real. Because that's where the dark things live. Because that's where the fears are. A benevolent glance switching to sudden, startling malevolence. An empty room with murderous corners. An eyeball turning dense black. Ek Thi Daayan starts so well that you are riveted. Just about everything in the first half, with its well-calibrated chills, is just as it should be. The second half is unravel time, and you are then left grasping at thin air. Quite appropriate in a film about magic and apparitions and witches, and, yes, daayans. The sharp slide wants to make you ask, what just happened here, did a black cat cross the path of the film?
Bobo (Hashmi) is a conjurer. He is in the middle of a show when something strange happens on stage, leaving him shaking. A visit to a shrink who has known him since childhood leads him back to his tragic past, in which his father and little sister died, the scars of which he hasn't managed to shake off. The cause, as we are shown through young Bobo's eyes, is a daayan, who seduces his father (Malhotra, solid as ever), and befriends his little sister, for the express purpose of taking lives.
Now Bobo is older, and is finally ready to get rid of his ghastly memories. But daayans don't give up their prey so easily, it seems. The disturbing visions begin again. People close to him are threatened, and the daayan with "the long plait which has all her strength" and "the arms longer than the body" is back. The skill with which the story is built up, in a flat full of atmospherics, eschewing horror clichés helps us get past the hokeyness of the daayan premise. If daayans and their deeds are so entertaining, I said to myself at the interval, bring them on. The disappointment begins with a mehndi-shaadi song. Why, why? The writing becomes obvious, the surprises disappear, and the big reveal is such a mash-up of so many previous spookfests that Ek Thi Daayan becomes more 'Kab Hogi Khatam'.
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