Spoof, Spook or Sermon?

Gauri - The Unborn (A)
Directed by Aku Akbar
Cast: Rushita Pandya, Rituparna Sengupta, Atul Kulkarni, Anupam Kher
Produced by: Amit Mohan
Duration: 100 mins

It usually with much nervous-giggling and chair-gripping anxiety that one treads in to watch a horror flick. But fear not, for Gauri - The Unborn wont be sending you home with any nightmares, except those of having to see it again.

Gauri.. starts off promisingly. The eerie background score by Raju Singh during the titles sets the mood and you watch with bated breath as the camera zooms in from outer space to earth and zeros in on a playground, where a young, enthusiastic mother, Roshni (Rituparna) is cheering for her daughter Shivani (Rushita). All of a sudden Shivani is pushed by invisible hands as she starts her race. The camera pans down slowly to show the hand marks of a child appear on her back to loud music that sounds like a hundred train wheels screeching simultaneously. And it's from then that you start to fear, not the ghost, but the director's style of introducing horror in very obvious, lame ways.

Enter Sudeep (Atul), Roshni's successful architect husband with insatiable lust for his wife. A holiday is planned to Mauritius but alas! The spirit that's found it's way into adorable Shivani from its stratospheric abode makes her inclined to throw regular heavy-breathing tantrums. Shivani hisses menacingly that they visit an old family house or else- and so thats where her obeying parents take her.

Things start to go wrong when they reach the house, with some really chilling moments thrown in. But since the writer-cum-director insists on delivering a 'social' message as well, we have a precocious six-year-old tell her mother why its wrong to abort a child through lengthy dialogues, diluting all that adrenalin pumped. Coupled with the writer's fondness for leaving nothing to the imagination, by the intermission you have the plot and motive neatly spelt out for you.

When the next scene opens to the done-to-death blue night, lightening and rain, you almost roll your eyes. The sudden appearence of the child (to more train-braking sounds) gets predictable, like spotting the toes of a person posed behind a door, waiting to say boo.

On the acting side, Rituparna and Atul are believable and competent. Anupam Kher hams his anti-abortion lecture, but then who can blame him? The movie clearly belongs to little Rushita with her winsome looks and sudden freezing stares.

The pace slackens where it should not, thanks to the weak screenplay by Mohan Azaad. The sudden returns to normalcy disconnects you completely from the earlier eerie moments, making them feel like spoofs. The most incredulous angle is of course the ghost's obession with the bath tub where she was conceived (yes, you got that right).

The movie equally suffers from the treatment meted out to it by Aku Akbar. Is it a fantasy-ridden special-effects horror flick like "The Ring"? Or is it supposed to have those believable, it-could-happen-to-you scenes like in "What lies beneath" and "Bhoot"? Or is all a gigantic effort on Akbar's part to rap aborting parents on their knuckles by putting the fear of the devil in them? For instance, Roshni and Sudeep are freaked to tears and regret when they are told that millions of unborn souls are wailing in fear and crying out for their mommies on dark stormy nights. The determined push for a guilt trip gets trite and makes you feel no pity for the knife-throwing, badly behaved imp of a ghost.

Unless you're the kind who'd believe in vengeful souls of murdered chickens and cockroaches, give this a miss.

Rating: **