Rarely Spooky Enough To Deliver Jump Scares

Konkani lore meets pop culture excess in Munjya, a horror comedy that lets the funny edge out the spooky, often unintentionally so. Messy and muddled, it demands willing suspension of disbelief and fails to secure it.

Directed by Aditya Sarpotdar and written by Niren Bhatt on the basis of a story developed by Yogesh Chandekar, the Maddock Films production is the fourth entry in the banner’s slate of supernatural flicks after Stree, Roohi and Bhediya. It is no patch on Stree and Bhediya and probably only marginally better than Roohi.

Stree and Bhediya addressed themes that went well beyond the fear factor that the genre thrives on. The former employed the occult to highlight female empowerment, the latter used the metaphor of a beast on the prowl and championed the cause of environmental conservation. Does Munjya do anything more than blending superficial humour and the terror of the dark? Not quite.

At best, Munjya tells us that dread gets the better of us because we recoil from it. Face it and resist it and victory will be yours, somebody tells Bittu (Abhay Verma), a young man who works in his mother’s beauty salon and yearns to break free from her apron strings.

Munjya feels far longer than its two hours because the mumbo-jumbo that it foists upon us gives way frequently to difficult-to-digest twaddle. It centres on a battle between a creature from the nether world and a youngster who has nightmares that he cannot wrap his head around. People think he is on drugs. He has a hard disavowing them of the suspicion.

Bittu’s mom, Pammi (Mona Singh), is overprotective and baulks at the idea of the boy flying the coop in search of greener pastures – and a life of his own. But the mother isn’t the only one he has to reckon with. The child-demon, Munjya, more mischievous than malefic, pursues Bittu relentlessly.

Seventy years back in an idyllic and picturesque Konkan village by the sea, a teenager smitten with an older girl dies within days of his mundan. Unfulfilled desire turns him into a lovelorn ghoul who seeks human sacrifice, a ritual that he could not complete when he was a living and breathing boy, as recompense.

Munjya follows Bittu from the forest all the way to Pune looking for Munni, the girl he loved and lost. Bittu’s childhood friend, Bela (Sharvari Wagh), who is older than him but is an object of suppressed affection, gets sucked unwittingly into a deal that endangers her life.

The VFX is rudimentary and the CGI creature, an impish, Gremlin-like being who prances around at will, is not the sort of device that can put the fear of God in the audience. Munjya, visible only to Bittu, refuses to set the boy free until his bidding is done. That spells trouble as much for Bittu as for the film. The creature hops from one form to another and so does the film. Munjya never quite discovers a solid core.

Thunder, lightning, sea waves, ominous shadows in the forest and a tree with a tentacled trunk are all pressed into service to rustle up an atmosphere of mystery and anxiety. But at no point does Munjya manage to inveigle the audience into buying into the wild and wayward yarn that it spins.

Neither the prowling CGI creature nor the boy that it torments evoke either fear, alarm or empathy. Yes, an attempt is made to give Bittu a cherubic Harry Potter-like look – he is a guy who must dig deep within to find the magic that could help him counter the persistent Munjya.

Bittu never loses his eyeglasses no matter how many falls he endures. He even sleeps with his spectacles on. We do want him to get out of the trouble he is but way more interesting than the harried boy is his Sikh friend and confidant Diljit Singh Dhillon “Spielberg”, a videographer who aspires to be a filmmaker.

Late in the film, a charlatan, Elvis Karim Prabhakar, comes in with his ‘hand of god’ to exorcise ghosts. Bittu and his pal see him peddle his miracle. They seek his help in fighting off Munjya. The battle shifts back to the forest where it all began. From there on, it is a free for all.

Munjya, shot with great flair by cinematographer Saurabh Goswami, is rarely spooky enough to deliver jump scares. It is all so cartoonish that one feels that it might have worked far better as an animated film. Live action tends to make everything so literal that the intrigue inherent in the concept is drastically undermined. Animation would have given the writers and the director greater leeway with the flights of fancy that a folk legend-inspired story such as this demands.

The acting in Munjya is mercifully not as over the top as the storyline is. The spotlight is on the eponymous creature but Abhay Verma as the boy struggling to hold on to his sanity does enough not to be overshadowed. Mona Singh, Sharvari Wagh and Suhas Joshi (as Bittu’s Ajji, a key cog in the Munjya backstory) are all more than adequate in a film in which the focus isn’t really on them.

Munjya is the sort of film that you want off your back as desperately as Bittu wants Munjya off his! It outlives its welcome well before it is into its second half. It is easy to see that a great deal of effort has gone into its making. What it yields is hardly commensurate.