These four Directors are back again and this time to spook you with their imagination about ghosts, although how much of it was effectful is a huge question. Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar and Zoya Akhtar, started their trend of compiling stories with their infamous ‘Bombay Talkies’, however, their second collaboration ‘Lust Stories’ might have garnished them a bit of success, but the third attempt with ‘Ghost Stories’ could not level up to the mark again.
To go on and talk about the mini series without saying a word about the opening credits seems unfair. In the opening animation we see a man running around a cemetery, being attacked by what looks like ‘zombies’. The animation’s sound is something so eerie that even when the first scene starts it takes time to register that the animation has smoothly ended. As the ‘Kaw Kaw’ of animated crows, merges with the images. On the second note, the three stories show presence of crows in some way or the other and do make us think why it gets broken when it comes to Karan Johar’s story.
The anthology starts with Zoya Akhtar’s ‘Nurse’, where we see the newbie of Bollywood town, Janhvi Kapoor taking the centre stage and literally standing in the middle of the frame, road and on an unconscious level even the character’s life. Janhvi is a nurse (Sameera) attending an elderly woman who has been ignored by her own son. The story draws parallels between the two main characters, with systematic placing of many mirrors and the fact that both characters are getting ignored by the leading men in their lives, one lover and one son. Aftera a great creative build up, the story ends on some illogical and hard to digest ending.
The second story by Anurag Kashyap, is majorly in Black and white or in a better word ‘grey’. The story is strongly held by the performance of Shobhita Dhulipala (Neha), a lonely pregnant woman who is eagerly waiting for her child and takes care of her nephew during the day. The story speaks strongly of obsession, Neha being obsessed to become a mother specially after a miscarriage (or several, the story is vague about this), and of her nephew’s obsession to get fully accepted by her without any competition. Neha’s obsession with caring for children is shown in a pretty obvious way of her caring for her nephew, then caring for bird’s eggs in her attic and then in an eerie way while she pretends to be the mother of a doll. While, the nephew’s obsession comes out generally in his questions directed towards his father on their way back home.
After a protruding built up the story ends with some similarities to the movie ‘Birdman’, with the main actress hallucinating herself as a bird. The third one by Dibakar Banerjee, opens up with a POV of a man talking on his phone to his family and like any other common man is seen distraught with his job. The Visitor played by Sukant Goel, is entering a village in the dark and ends up becoming guardian of two children, who are in hiding. From whom? Well, their parents who have now become cannabis, the why of such atrocities are discussed in vague arguments between the children. The piece feels to be best amongst the four with many layers and is pretty symbolic where the end leaves you with a dilemma of what was dream and what was reality.
Although, after taking you to these heights the drama drastically droops to the very Karan Johar ‘type’ storytelling. Yes, the fourth and the end segment of these stories is by Karan Johar, which shows cliched, high society arranged marriage and as soon as the bride is about to hit climax, enters Grandma. The story is pretty cliched, with majorly just one scene where Mrunal Thakur loses all her cool and gives her audience, some minutes of pure entertainment.
The whole anthology in all is a very predictable graph of starting at high notes and then becoming a disappointing cliched version of stories which we have already either read or seen. In all we can say the hype of these film makers coming together again dies a natural death after a quick watch and we definitely want to advise them to move on from this genre.
