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Naina
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'Naina' A glimpse into the unknown

By Nitika Desai
Film critic, ApunKaChoice.Com

The bright and colorful world of a five-year-old girl is ‘eclipsed’ after a fatal accident in London. It turns out that her destiny is strangely intertwined with another girl in the tiny hamlet Bhuj in Gujarat.

Naina is a promising effort by director Shripal Morakhia. But the originality of the movie’s story is in doubt because it bears stark resemblance to Pang Brothers’ Chinese film ‘Jian Gui’ and Manoj Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Sixth Sense’.

While

Naina is not as good as the real thing, the movie still spooks you. And the credit for this goes jointly to Urmila Matondkar (who takes to spooky roles like a fish to water), to Morakhia (for his sensible direction) and to the film’s cinematographer and sound specialists.

Story:

The eclipse is symbolic. A five-year-old girl sits on the backseat of a car as her parents drive through the streets of London. The car meets with an accident. Her parents die. She loses her eyesight.

Twenty years later, Naina (Urmila Matondkar) regains her eyesight after a cornea transplant. As she opens her eyes to a world that remained in the dark for her for two decades, Naina discovers to her utter shock that she can see dead people.

It turns out that she is seeing the world through the eyes of a Gujarat village girl named Khemi (the cornea donor) who had strange psychic powers, lived a turbulent life and died in anguish.

Naina’s search for answers takes her from London to Bhuj in Gujarat where the true story of Khemi is revealed to her.

Despite the fact that Naina is packed with scary moments, it cannot be called a milestone in Bollywood horror genre for the simple reason that the film is not original.

The movie’s director Shripal Morakhia seems to have a good understanding of human fears and he stirs them well with some finely executed sequences like when Naina sees apparitions in the art gallery, in the restaurant, and comes face-to-face with the ‘girl-in-the-mirror’ at the interval point.

Thankfully, the film has no songs to give the audience some breathing space in between the scares. The story unfolds at a slick pace through the first half, moves from London to Gujarat in the second half, and just when you think that the chapter of Khemi was closed for good, comes a bolt out of the blue.

Those who haven’t seen the Chinese film ‘Jian Gui’ will certainly be spooked out of their minds by Naina. Those who have seen will wait to get out of the hall.

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