Ghost Stories | Reviews and Discussion | Netflix

Ghost Stories review: Where are the scares?

Ghost Stories review: All four segments are well produced, but the plots are predictable, and feel familiar. Seriously, where are the scares?

• Written By Shubhra Gupta | New Delhi |
• Published: January 1, 2020 12:47:20 pm

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Ghost Stories cast: Janhvi Kapoor, Surekha Sikri, Vijay Varma, Sobhita Dhulipala, Sagar Arya, Pavail Gulati, Sukant Goel, Gulshan Devaiah, Mrunal Thakur, Avinash Tiwary, Aditya Shetty, Eva Ameert
Ghost Stories directors: Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar
Ghost Stories rating: 2 stars

The quartet which who gave us Bombay Talkies and Lust Stories have regrouped for Ghost Stories.

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Four shorts strung together with the promise of bhoot-praet-aatma is not exactly how I wanted to begin my new year. But there it is (just dropped) on Netflix, and here I am, having just got done with it.

A young, attractive nurse (Janhvi) walks into a once-well-appointed-now-neglected flat, to take care of a bed-ridden old woman (Surekha). The former is needy, clutching at a reluctant lover (Vijay); the latter, a stunner in her time, looks as if she scythed through men back in the day. Now it’s night, and time for things to go bump.

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Dolls are scary, especially when they sit in a row, and stare back at you with their beady eyes. A pregnant young woman (Sobhita), going up and down a steep set of stairs, a possessive little boy, and the harsh cowing of crows. The colours are leached out, the mother-to-be is constantly wary, all is ominous: what is going to happen?

A young man (Sukant) gets off at a railhead and walks towards a village where he’s meant to join work. But things go south rapidly, as he bumps into a boy and girl (Aditya Shetty and Eva Ameert) cowering in a corner, scared out of their wits. The desolate village feels like place that time’s forgotten, and, wait a minute, who are those figures clomping about outside, snarling and drooling?

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A pretty young thing (Mrunal) agrees to have an ‘arranged marriage’ with a handsome, wealthy fellow (Avinash) who lives in a house his granny built. She soon discovers that all is not as it seems in the stately mansion she comes to as a bride: the housekeeper glowers, the in-laws are strangely sedate, and the spouse likes playing peekaboo. Ooh.

Atmospherics-wise, all four segments come off fine. Each instantly creates a specific world, and we get drawn in. But surprise-wise, that jump-start of shock-and-startle, Ghost Stories doesn’t score high, and that’s where it falters: those who familiar with genre movies, or have seen enough horror/supernatural/critters will pretty much guess where things are headed to.

The crucial question is: did someone like me, who is petrified of any brand of horror, genteel or oblique or straight-up in-your-face, emerge shaking? Honest confession: I closed my eyes in exactly two places. The rest of it was a series of oh look, there it comes, and oh look, it’s hoved out of view, phew.

Bombay Talkies felt mint-new, Karan Johar revealed how surprisingly spiky he could be; Anurag Kashyap’s jar of murabbas was memorable in a tale that lagged, Zoya Akhtar’s little boy who likes to wear dresses was bright and alive, and Dibakar Bannerjee’s fabulous segment I still keep visiting in my head.

Lust Stories was great in parts, with the freshness persisting, because love-that-turns-into-lust, or just plain hormones-raging-lust is not Bollywood’s suit. A young wife trying very hard to bite down on the vibrations going through her, via a suitable object? The sweetest spot of all.

Ghosts have a long lineage, though, and it’s hard to create newness. I got flashes of similar (John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca), but a couple of moments did stop my heart: one involving a long feathered arm, the other more sound, than visual: the crunch of teeth on bone. The only real surprise comes from Janhvi Kapoor in a solid, real act.

All four segments are well produced, but the plots are predictable, and feel familiar. Seriously, where are the scares?

The only real surprise comes from Janhvi Kapoor in a solid, real act.

Shubhra Gupta ka bhi dil jeet liya!

Ghost Stories movie review: Janhvi Kapoor and Sobhita Dhulipala anchor Netflix's…By

 lokesh1994-

 January 1, 20200

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Ghost Stories movie review: Sobhita Dhulipala in a still from Anurag Kashyap’s short.

Ghost Stories
Directors – Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibarkar Banerjee, Karan Johar
Cast – Janhvi Kapoor, Mrunal Thakur, Sobhita Dhulipala, Gulshan Devaiah, Surekha Sikri, Vijay Varma

Like your neighbourhood aunty, Hindi cinema doesn’t do horror. So it’s rather interesting to see four filmmakers who represent the broad spectrum of Hindi moviemaking, come together to experiment with a genre that the industry believes is best avoided.

But unlike 2018’s Lust Stories, and indeed, the filmmakers’ first anthology film together, 2013’s Bombay Talkies, Netflix’s Ghost Stories is an uneven and ultimately impotent affair. There are occasional moments of magic, especially in a couple of segments, but they’re inconsistent. It should be noted that none of the four filmmakers — Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar — has made a horror movie before. God knows Johar has scared audiences, but this time, he’s expected to.

Watch the Ghost Stories trailer here [embedded content]

Ghost Stories begins rather promisingly, though, with Akhtar’s technically impeccable short. Janhvi Kapoor plays Sameera, a nurse who’s assigned to look after a senile old woman, played by Surekha Sikri. For a filmmaker who’s expressed her apathy for horror, Akhtar does a splendid job of appropriating some of the genre’s most recognisable tropes — visually and tonally. Think of her film as an elaborate Halloween costume; you can’t deny the effort and skill that must have gone into making it, but in the end, it can’t help but feel slightly superficial.

The film is wonderful to look at — the creaky old Mumbai apartment, set against the backdrop of incessant rains, is intricately designed — and Akhtar does an excellent job of laying out the geography of the place. So when a noise wakes Sameera up in the middle of the night, we’re subconsciously aware of where it might have come from. Akhtar puts us in her protagonist’s shoes, allowing us to feel what she’s feeling, successfully sustaining dread in this age of jump-scare filmmaking.

It’s a fun tweak on that old babysitter-in-peril premise, but Sameera most certainly isn’t a vapid, virginal victim. Janhvi instils in her an instant warmth, and even though her accent might not be as consistent as her performance, there’s an effortless charm about her. Surekha Sikri, meanwhile, knows exactly the sort of film she’s in, effectively alternating between her character’s many moods with precision and restraint. But I struggled to understand the larger point Akhtar was trying to make, or if there even was any. This is unfortunate, especially if you remember the muffled voices she handed a megaphone to in Gully Boy, and also in her Lust Stories short.

Like the first segment, the second, directed by Anurag Kashyap, is also a twist on familiar horror movie tropes. Featuring yet another largely solitary performance at its centre, Kashyap’s short is a wildly ambitious mashup of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Richard Donner’s The Omen, with a bit of Cronenbergian body horror thrown in for good measure. Unlike Akhtar’s film, this one has anxieties to address — about motherhood and mania, loss and loneliness.

Janhvi Kapoor in a still from Zoya Akhtar’s short from Ghost Stories.

As always, Sobhita Dhulipala proves that she can be an astonishingly reliable actor, regardless of what she’s given to work with. She’s able to add more dimensions to her character in 30-odd minutes here than she was in seven episodes of the shoddy Bard of Blood. But once again, the film is more impressive technically — the deathly desaturated colour palette, the sneaky visual foreshadowing, the impressive practical effects — than on a narrative level. Kashyap has never been one to pull punches, but he seems to lack the courage of his convictions here, especially towards the end, when he chooses to spell out certain details that he’d already effectively communicated through his filmmaking.

Banerjee, in his segment, also seems to be conflicted. Should he make the most of the creative freedom that has been given to him, or should he keep one foot in the realm of the mainstream and not risk alienating the majority of the audience that is likely to watch his film? In the end, he gets spliced, clearly struggling with the exposition that is necessary to build the fictional fantasy world that he has created, and to deliver the thrills that are expected of him.

Surprisingly, Banerjee is the only one who decided to go political with his short. In all honesty, I was expecting at least two others to also use the creative liberties at their disposal, and the opportunities that genre filmmaking affords writers, to make some sort of statement about the world. Banerjee’s film is sort of like a Grimm Brothers’ fairytale, combined with the post-apocalyptic aesthetic of a modern zombie movie and the absurdity of a propaganda pamphlet. It would be unfair to reveal more details about the film, especially because this segment, for good reason, has the potential to be the most divisive. But there are interesting ideas in there, about our place in the world, and how precarious it really is.

Mrunal Thakur in a still from Karan Johar’s short from Ghost Stories.

In a shocking turn of events, I suspect that Johar’s short might be the most palatable of the lot, especially to audiences who are, rightly so, caught unawares by the sheer abstractness of some of the previous segments. This one, despite featuring the thinnest characters and absolutely no perspective to speak of, is a more traditional haunted house story. To be clear, Johar isn’t communicating his own personal fears through his film, but appears to have based his ideas on what someone else has told him horror should be. And so there are scenes in which poor Mrunal Thakur, skimpily dressed, is sent on midnight walks around a house she should have checked out of ages ago. There is also a sleep-walking mother-in-law and a creepy Catholic maid. But whatever momentum Johar is inadvertently able to build is tossed out of a Spanish window when he cuts to Kusha Kapila, as our heroine’s BFF, popping in to make a smutty joke or two.

Also read: Neha Dhupia on facing sexism in South film industry: ‘They insisted on feeding hero first and I would say I am hungry’

The result is a tonally inconsistent but visually refined film that throws in random Christian symbolism with desi scare tactics, and ends up resembling one of those Ekta Kapoor serials about naagins and whatnot. It’s a mess, but it’s also the only segment that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Perhaps reshuffling the lineup might have helped, but this is assuming you watch the entire thing in one setting. Ideally, Ghost Stories, for its own sake, must not be seen as a whole. It’s fearless, but frustrating; ambitious, but not ambitious enough.

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New year ke pehle din Mai ghost stories kyun dekhu😛

Bundle movie

Kjo movie is the worst , acting to screenplay , is more like a parody .

Zoya movie is strictly decent ,no scary parts and acting is passable with boring story

Anurag movie is more a metaphor and symbolism movie , horror movie viewer have seen such movie with better execution , shobhita was good but story was dull, some casual bollywood wTcher might find it gory or something.

Dibakar movie is watchable ,just for fun ideas and execution but bigtown,small-town, politics is forced throat in your mouth and ending is choppy 

Janu got good reviews for dhadak too n after watching the movie😳

WDF IS WRONG WITH ANURAG KASHYAP???!!

Originally posted by: Zeal17

New year ke pehle din Mai ghost stories kyun dekhu😛

Exactly 😛

Zoya: Jhanvi was amazing and she's so comfortable onscreen. I thought the story was heading towards "The Boy" but it actually surprised me. Although, I didn't know what the deeper message was supposed to be. Like was the woman telling her to live her life before it's too late, or what?

Anurag: This one had the best execution and was creepy af in the end. I'm still trying to figure out if the woman was crazy or the boy was crazy lol but I guess that Anurag would you--open to your interpretations. But Shobita is on fire, what an actress. The body language was also perfect.

Dibanker: I accepted more but still amazing. I like the backgroun noises and color palette of this one the most.

KJo: Dude is always so superficial. I agree with the reviews, his is the weakest but still the most fun to watch if that makes sense. He understands entertainment but it's a lot of been there done that with him. Mrunal was decent but Jhanvi and Shobita were obvi better.

Ghost stories was fun to watch but BW needs to do what Tumbbad did, damn that movie still gives me chills.

Zoya- acting was nice.. screenplay was good but the overall impact was underwhelming in the end...5/10

Anurag- acting by shobita was so so good.. chilling .. the story seemed intriguing and could be weird for some but in the end it was okay.. 6/10

Dipankar- this one was the best in terms of story.. the children acting was great esp. the boy was just mind blowing he stole the show for me... ending story wise was good but could have been more polished 7.5/10

Karan- mrunal looked beautiful..this girl should get more boldly movies she reminds me of kajol ..the guy is also a good actor but story and screen play was maha boring..2/10