Covering Bollywood and the Hindi Cinema

Bhool Bhulaiya is being appreciated by critics and the public on home ground. Curious how the movie is doing beyond the desi shores? Here is a review from NY Times written by Stephen Holden.

Even by the extravagant standards of Bollywood movies, “Bhool Bhulaiya,” a lavish comic epic about psychiatry, mythology and spiritualism, has a lot of plot. Its star, Akshay Kumar, doesn’t appear until about a third of the way into the film. The moment he does, “Bhool Bhulaiya” morphs from an opulent romantic ghost story into a slapstick farce as Mr. Kumar’s character, Aditya, a psychiatrist summoned to a haunted palace to examine one character’s suspicious behavior, mugs and clowns and acts crazier than anyone else. From there the movie becomes a sumptuous quasihorror film about demonic possession and exorcism.
The trouble begins when Siddharth (Shiney Ahuja), a scientist trained in the United States, returns to India with his beautiful, American-reared Indian wife, Avni (Vidya Balan). Thoroughly Westernized, Siddharth disdains his relatives’ belief that the family’s ancestral palace is too dangerous to inhabit because angry spirits still dwell there, and he pressures the whole clan to move in. Once they do, the place erupts with strange happenings.

Midway through the movie, spectacle gives way to talky comedy as debate rages about the existence of ghosts, which Siddharth insists are collective fantasies of a culture drenched in religious mythology. The movie, written and directed by Priyadarshan, initially agrees. But as the troubles worsen, it changes sides and culminates with a spectacular Indian exorcism involving fire, swords and hypnosis.

The vengeful female spirit put to rest is angrier than Linda Blair’s Regan MacNeil, but not foul-mouthed; there’s not a drop of pea soup in sight.