In another This Drivel That Year feature, Subhash K Jha looks back at Ram Gopal Varma’s horror Phoonk 2 which released 15 years ago.
Phoonk 2 is definitely NOT the scariest film we’ve seen. Varma’s terror theme has clearly run its course. What we see here are the remnants of another Friday. And definitely not Friday The 13th.
Perched somewhere between crowing (ahem ahem) about the supernatural and crying over the nerve-wracking disruption of domestic harmony by a ghost which just won’t go away Phoonk 2 is like that promised rollercoaster ride which gets aborted in the first lap because of a short circuit.
It’s not really Varma or his director Milind Gadkar’s fault. It’s the nature of the material. Ram Gopal Varma’s love for horror has never extended beyond the there-something-under-the-bed kind of unwarranted foreboding that we all feel in a new environment. In a majority of his horror films, a family moves into a new haunted home and experiences the eerie.
Ironically, Varma’s best effort in the horror genre was Kaun, where the victim of terror (Urmila Matondkar) was stalked by unseen forces in her own familiar home. The terror, it turned out, was not under the bed but in the mentally disturbed girl’s head.
There wasn’t much terror, let alone horror, in Phoonk . Under the bed or in the head. In Phoonk 2, the characters’ screeching plea to have us believe they are in immediate peril is sadly not communicated to the viewers. We remain tragically detached from the trauma of Kannada star Sudeep’s family.
Haven’t we seen it all? By now, the trademark Varma camera movements, here manoeuvred with emphatic energy by cinematographer Charles Meher, and the intricate cluttered but effective sound design (Jayesh Dhakan, Jayant Vajpayee) do nothing to suck us into the plot.
The technique remains unfastened to the characters. Their desperate attempts to escape the supernatural remain desperately detached from the audience. At the end of the two-hour zone of error terror, we are left wondering why Varma opened a contest inviting any viewer to undergo an ECG to check his heartbeats.
It is this film that needs a respiratory system. Varma’s last horror outing Agyaat, with its spooky ominous wide-open jungles, was far more gripping. In Phoonk 2, you wonder what the fuss is about. These people have nothing to fear except fear itself.
And yes, Ramu was right. The crow does come up with the best performance. And that’s nothing to crow about.
