Ek Thi Daayan
Year: 2013
Director: Kannan Iyer
Cast: Emraan Hashmi, Konkona Sen, Kalki Koechlin

Horror has been a profitable genre in Bollywood but even though numerous Ramsay and Bhatt-sagas and some RGV-flicks have made plenty of money at the box-office in the past; none of them have really made much impression as creative fares. So we have had many mostly unoriginal supernatural sagas, which have delivered few scary moments here and there but have not quite succeeded ending up as a wholly satisfying movie-experience. So is Ek Thi Daayan- a horror-film produced and co-written by the talented Vishal Bhardwaj any different?

What’s the plot?

A young and successful magician (Emraan Hashmi) is at the height of his popularity. His shows are huge and his tricks truly mesmerizing. He has a beautiful girlfriend (Huma Qureshi), with whom he plans to settle down. But some disturbing visions from past keep haunting him, sometimes right in the middle of his stage-performances and mostly when he visits his now deserted family flat. In order to get to the root of this problem, he decides to revisit his traumatic past and undergoes a hypnosis session with the psychiatrist from his childhood.

The hypnosis takes him back to his childhood years, when he was staying in the same flat with his father and younger sister. There he once again comes to be reminded of his scary, life-shattering encounter with a mystery woman (Konkona Sen), whom he has always believed to be a witch from hell. But are those memories for real? Or are they merely figments of imagination from an overactive child’s mind?

As he tries to leave his past behind by finally marrying his girlfriend, he once again finds himself staring evil in face. A young woman (Kalki Koechlin) appears in the middle of his show; she claims to be his fan and makes an offer to buy the flat where so much had happened in the past! What exactly is happening? Is the witch back again?

What’s hot?

·         Kannan Iyer’s direction can do no wrong in the superbly spooky first half, which keeps you on the edge of your seat, anxiously waiting for the next twist.

·         Konkona Sen is brilliant as a mystery woman. Her facial and vocal expressions keep you guessing whether she is just another lady or a supernatural phenomenon.

·         Emraan Hashmi is by now a veteran in playing the guy haunted by lady-ghosts and here, too he plays the role with aplomb.

·         Vishal Bhardwaj’s music is top-notch.

What’s not?

·         Just when you expect this scary ride to continue in the second half, the writing and the direction start going inexplicably awry and the film starts losing pace and punch.

·         The last third of the film looks straight out of Bollywood’s many B and C-grade horror-films.

·         Performances of Huma Qureshi and Kalki Koechlin suffer because of poor writing.

Verdict

For more than one hour, Ek Thi Daayan keeps you on tenterhooks with its excellent atmospheric horror build-up but when it comes to making the final leap into unknown, it badly crashes and burns. Alas, it really could have been a rare Bollywood horror classic!