Hardly enough to provide a jump scare
Konkani lore permeates pop culture MunzyaA horror comedy that lets the funny edge out of the haunting, often unintentionally so. Messy and untidy, it demands a willing suspension of disbelief and fails to secure it.
Directed by Aditya Sarpotdar and written by Neeren Bhatt based on a story created by Yogesh Chandekar, the Madoc Films production is the fourth entry in the banner’s slate of supernatural flicks. Wife, Ruhi And Vedia. It’s no patch on str And Vedia And maybe little better than that Ruhi.
str And Vedia Themes are addressed that go beyond the fear factor that the genre thrives on. The former employed witchcraft to highlight women’s empowerment, the latter used an animal metaphor in Prowl and championed the cause of environmental conservation. by doing Munzya Can you do anything but a mixture of superficial humor and dark horror? Not quite.
at best, Munzya Tells us that fear makes us better because we move away from it. Face it and resist it and victory will be yours, someone tells Bittuk (Abhay Verma), a young man who works in his mother’s beauty salon and wants to get rid of his apron strings.
Munzya It takes much longer than two hours because the mumbo-jumbo it foists on us often gives way to hard to digest. It centers on a battle between a creature from the nether world and a young man who has nightmares that he can’t get his head around. People think he is a drug addict. He found it difficult to deny their suspicions.
Bittu’s mother, Pammi (Mona Singh), is overprotective and the idea of the boy flying the coop in search of greener pastures – and his own life. But Mom isn’t the only one he has to reckon with. baby monster, MunzyaMore mischievous than evil, pursues Bittu relentlessly.
Seventy years ago in a picturesque and picturesque Konkan village by the sea, a teenager smitten with an older girl dies within days of his mundan. Insatiable desire turns him into a loving ghoul who seeks human sacrifice, a ritual he was unable to complete as a living and breathing boy, as retribution.
Munzya Follows Bittu from the jungle to Pune in search of Munni, the girl he loved and lost. Bittu’s childhood friend, Bela (Sharbari Wagh), who is older than him but the object of his repressed affection, unknowingly gets involved in a deal that threatens his life.
VFX are rudimentary and CGI beasts, an impish, gremlin-like entity that roams at will, not a device to instill the fear of God in the audience. Munjya, visible only to Bittu, refuses to free the boy until he does his bidding. This creates as much trouble for Bittu as it does for the film. The creature moves from one form to another and so does the film. Munzya never discovers a solid core.
Thunder, lightning, ocean waves, ominous shadows in the forest and a tree with a tentacle trunk are all pressed into service to create an atmosphere of mystery and suspense. But not at any stage Munzya Manage to find an audience to buy into the wild and deviant yarn it spins.
Neither the roaming CGI creature nor the boy it torments evokes fear, dread or sympathy. Yes, an attempt has been made to give Bittu a cherubic look like Harry Potter – he’s a guy who must dig deep to find the magic that can help him resist the constant. Munzya.
No matter how many falls Bittu endures, he never loses his glasses. He even sleeps with glasses on. We want him to get out of the trouble he’s in, but his Sikh friend and confidant Diljit Singh Dhillon is more interesting than “Spielberg”, a videographer who aspires to be a filmmaker.
Towards the end of the film, a charlatan named Elvis Karim Prabhakar arrives to exorcise the ghost with his ‘Hand of God’. Bittu and his pal see him perform his miracle. They ask for his help to stop the war Munzya. The battle moves back to the forest where it all began. From there, it’s a free-for-all.
MunzyaShot with great flair by cinematographer Sourav Goswami, the jump scares are hardly scary. It’s so cartoonish that one feels it might work better as an animated film. Live action makes everything so literal that the underlying intrigue of the concept is severely diminished. Animation gives writers and directors more scope with the flights of fancy that a folk legend-inspired story demands.
Acting in it Munzya Mercifully not as over the top as the storyline. On A Creature Called Spotlight But Abhay Varma Boy Struggles To Keep His Sanity Enough To Not Be A Shadow. Mona Singh, Sharbari Wagh and Suhas Joshi (as Bittur Aji, a key cog in Munjya’s backstory) are all more than adequate in a film where the focus isn’t really on them.
Munzya The kind of film you want to get off your back as desperately as Bittu Munjha! It lives up to its welcome well before it moves into its second half. It is easy to see that a lot of effort has gone into making it. What it yields is hardly consistent.
