How far would a woman go to have a baby? The question appears antiquated, if not entirely obsolete, in the present times when many women choose to forgo the mythical joys of motherhood.
Not the woman in debutant writer-director Kirtan Nadagouda’s 418, a fairly gripping horror Telugu shiver-giver with an eerie spine and a powerful storytelling acumen which keeps us watching till the very ambiguous and frustrating end.
Even when the going gets progressively preposterous, the action-terror set pieces have a clingy compelling quality to them: you just can’t shrug off this scare fare. Not without sitting through it, wondering what’s to come next.
Not that that Nadagouda, backed by Prashant ‘KGF’ Neel(no less is on an even pitch all through. The writing gets tediously overloaded at times. But it is still a better fear fest than the recent Vvann or Nayi Naveli which relied on poor FX to hoodwink the audience, and which weren’t sure what they wanted to do: scare us witless, or wear us down to a cowering pilgrims of supernaturalism.
This one takes a strong persuasive bullish one-direction stand. It wants to scare us, and there are enough jump-scare moments in the storytelling to keep the horrorphiles happy.
What the narrative lacks is cohesiveness. The mood favours wild swing-shifts, shifting from a college-campus creep-show, a la Prawal Raman’s 404: Error Not Found (to which this fear-fest owes more than a passing resemblance) to a chilling well-acted fable on human sacrifice.
The first half is voluble and borderline annoying with a boy’s hostel serving a prop for the half hearted scariness. The youngsters don’t just act, they want us to know they are doing so. But the payoff in the second-half makes the proceedings bearable, even arresting at times.
The actress Chaithra J. Achar looks like a mixture of Alia Bhatt and Keerthi Reddy. She delivers an engaging performance as a woman who gets sucked into dark occultism for the sake of motherhood. It is a difficult role defined by an aura of unnerving eeriness. Ms Achar gets it right.
This part of the narrative is striking for its cinematography (Dinesh Divakaran) which breaks the fourth wall to give the characters the shimmering tremulous visuals they require, if not entirely deserve.
Here there is the inbuilt danger of style superseding substance, a danger which the director expertly dodges. If anything, the film is overloaded with plot, moving from one jolting revelation to another until we feel we are being held hostage by a plot with no breathing space for itself , or us.
