Kumari: Home-groan gothic horror

Writer-director Nirmal Sahadev’s new Malayalam film on Netflix, is called Kumari. Which means virgin or unmarried or both.Sahadev tries so hard to put forward a fresh unique take on patriarchal tyranny, that the end-product feels like a pile of heavy logs balanced on the head of a very fragile woman determined to carry her burden across to its destination, whatever it might be. That woman in Kumari is Aishwarya Lekshmi . The lovely young actress has been growing from strength to strength in no time at all. The last we saw her she was an abused newly married wife in Charukesh Sekar’s Telugu film Ammu. Aishwarya again plays the role of a newly married bride thrown into a hellish household cursed by the gods for a brutal crime in the past.She looks pleasingly wholesome in her beautiful silk sarees and traditional makeup. The ambience of passionate foreboding is created with great care. The cinematography(by Abraham Joseph) is far more lyrical than the narration which tends to waffle between a Chandamama styled fairytale and a gothic horror tale with frighteningly misshapen monster men making a grab for Kumari’s baby. Sometimes Aishwarya behaves as though she is Jennifer Lawrence in Darren Aronofsky’s Mother protecting her unborn child from her monster husband played impressively but inconsistently by Shine Tom Chacko who wants to play the husband both as a victim and a perpetrator , a monster and a child whose wife must look after him like Mala Sinha in Bahurani, Hema Malini in Jyoti and Shabana Azmi in Swami. All hell breaks loose after the midpoint revelation about the family’s curse and the remedy. Both equally bizarre and incapable of dragging the film to the finishing line kicking screaming and groaning. So much goes horribly wrong with the heroine Kumari. But she conducts herself like a beauty in a bubble, unafraid of any danger from the beasts that roam in the forest. Aishwarya can only do this much the past, as it is a character driven by extraneous demons rather than her own personal insecurities. The climax where she fights to save her baby has two ghouls battling for the baby’s ownership. Neither of them is anywhere remotely intimidating, elaborate ghoulish prosthetics notwithstanding. The over-loaded background score creates a havoc of sounds, a mix of chants and rants meant to create a grandiosity that this film misses by miles. I fail to see why so many of the recent films are resorting to primitivism and fable-like themes to get the audiences in, Bhediya in Hindi and Kumari in Malayalam being the prime example.Among the film’s many visuals intended to disturb our equanimity , pebble-in-the-pond style, there is a little boy in the studio-constructed forest who offers mangoes to anyone he meets. No such compensations for us for sitting through this screechy, moaning , ranting romp into a mythological wreck where the evil ghouls are projected as so tormented you almost feel sorry for them.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.