Forty years ago, a girl was born in a landlord’s family in Chandarpur village in Bengal. The girl was immediately sent to her death – the landlord was steeped in Kali worship and believed that the girl infant must be sacrificed if Kali’s adversary, the demigod Raktabeej, was to be vanquished.
In the present, the landlord’s son Shubhankar (Indraneil Sengupta) has a mysterious accident while visiting his ancestral mansion. Shubhankar and his wife Ambika (Kajol) have avoided visiting Chandarpur for years. They especially don’t want to take their 12-year-old daughter Shweta (Jherin Sharma) there.
Yet, here are Ambika and Shweta in Chandarpur, fulfilling the first rule of the horror film formula: the lead characters will walk resolutely towards peril, ignoring every warning sign. Ambika finds herself battling a manifestation of a demonic force that has ghastly designs on Shweta and the other girls in the village.
The problem with Maa isn’t Ambika’s unreasonable actions – irrationality is a cornerstone of horror. Rather, the trouble with Vishal Furia’s movie is how literal-minded and feeble it turns out to be.
For a film about a potent and fierce goddess, Maa is a resolutely tame affair. Like Ambika, Maa too is constantly looking for miracles – a tough ask, given Saiwyn Quadras’s plodding screenplay, a barely scary monster created with pedestrian visual effects, and clumsy links between Ambika’s maternal instincts and Kali’s divine powers.
Furia’s previous three films – the Marathi-language Lapachhapi, its Hindi remake Chhorii and the sequel Chhorii 2 – have all been about women trying to protect their daughters from malevolent beings who represent the very real horror of patriarchy. Furia is admirably dedicated to making pure horror films rather than follow the trend of horror comedies.
Maa is a poor showcase of Furia’s feel for the genre. The film neither creates emotional engagement with its characters nor has the technical polish to be a convincing scare-fest. Except for a few scenes, there is a lack of atmospherics needed to carry off a tale of demonic possession.
No heart beat is skipped when the monster, looking like a mean-tempered version of the tree spirits from the Lord of the Rings films, makes its appearance. Nor is the big revelation about the monster’s human helper a real surprise.
A haunted jungle that is right next to the mansion, separated by a crumbling wall or two? A concerned mother who drags her daughter to a place that has never been good to young girls? A Bengali pre-teen who has been raised in Kolkata but has no idea about the belief system in Kali? Maa isn’t even trying.
The 135-minute film gains some traction towards the climax, when Ambika channelises her inner goddess. A heavily made-up Kajol tries her best, but the battle was lost even before Ambika set foot in Chandarpur.
Also read:
Vishal Furia on what makes a horror hit: Claustrophobia, metaphor, heart
