'Stree' (2018) is a horror-comedy based on an urban legend about a female ghost who haunts a town that killed her for daring to elope with a man of her choice. She comes annually for four nights every year and abducts men who wander alone at night, leaving only their clothes behind. The premise is deliciously quirky, and the writers (Raj & D.K.) and director (Amar Kaushik) run with it, painstakingly detailing this upside-down small-town world where religion and folklore rub shoulders with Whatsapp games and Aadhaar cards, and the result is by turns hilarious and terrifying.
The four male characters do all the heavy lifting here -- Rajkummar Rao as Vicky the town tailor brings charm to the role despite its similarities to his outing in 'Bareilly ki Barfi', Aparshakti Khurrana and Abhishek Banerjee nail the hapless, horny yet fearful friends, and Pankaj Tripathi brings down the house as the local wise-man who claims to know everything about this ghost but is quite as clueless as everyone else. Shraddha Kapoor is the weak link here, but thankfully her part is small enough for it not to ruin the general air of zaniness that pervades the film like a breath of fresh air throughout its runtime.
The satirical aspects of the film do get drowned out in all the scares and the laughs, and one wonders if the film isn't after all too clever for its own good (a tacky item number also does a lot to undo its larger feminist ambitions). I was alternating between laughing out loud and sitting quite literally on the edge of my seat, which means that it does work as a strikingly original caper even while its subversiveness doesn't quite come through. "Hello hello, falaana dhimkaana" is one of those lines that has cult potential. For more where that came from, watch the film.
Genre: Comedy, Horror
Language: Hindi
Runtime: 2h 8min
Year of release: 2018
Streaming platform: Netflix
Hot take is a series in which I offer my first impressions of films from India and around the world.
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