Post by odadune on Dec 4, 2013 22:05:40 GMT
(also starring Richa Gangapadhyay, with guest appearances by Anushka Shetty and Kamalinee Mukerjee).
I generally don't much care for Indian horror films, but I found this to be an amusing gothic melodrama with plenty of cool sets, pretty saris, dance numbers, and young women finding excuses to act scary-crazy (and in one case, pull a mild version of Linda Blair in the Exorcist). Basically the marriage of the youngest of three daughters (Richa) in a joint family is broken up by a series of weird happenings that appear to involve 1). a giant supernatural snake, 2). a haunted painting of a bharatnayam dancer (the titular Nagavalli, played by Anushka Shetty) and
3). the undead person of the evil king who killed the dancer.
Venkatesh plays a psychiatrist/paranormal investigator who is invited in to make sense of things and has a sort-of flirty/sort-of-not friendship with the middle daughter of the family (Shraddha Das).
He also has a second role as the aforementioned evil king, where he chews up the scenery as if it were made out of bubblegum.
Kamalinee has a small but powerful role as the eldest sister, who is involved in the whole business in a complicated way. Shraddha and Richa are entertainingly over the top but lack Kamalinee's and Anushka's force of personality. I did appreciate that Shraddha Das's character came off as comparatively strong-willed and sort of borderline feminist (at least without subtitles; I'm sure I missed out on a few patronizing male lectures). It's not any kind of forgotten classic, but if you're willing to overlook/fastforward a somewhat glib and preachy attitude towards the supernatural stuff,* it's a fun "family drama" with a bit of dishoom-dishoom, a bit of Ancient Times swashbuckling and mythical drama, and some spooky gothic stuff going on, and a tiny bit of female friendship in the mix.
Nagavalli is a descendent of the Malayalam haunted house story Manichitrathazhu, and I laid out its place in that somewhat complicated cycle of remake and sequels in the thread for that movie: bollywhat.boards.net/thread/178/manichitrathazhu-shobana-suresh-gopi-mohanlal?page=1#scrollTo=784
*I come from a religious tradition that basically equates possession by spirits to a form of rape, so the kind of
"oh, well, let the vindictive and not overly benign spirit do its thing"
attitude that Nagavalli seems to espouse did not sit well with me, but since I viewed it without subs I kind of suspended judgement on it.
Aditya Movies seems to have it up legitimately on youtube: