A confession at the outset. I don’t scare easy. You can let loose a ghost on me and minutes later find me giving him a face massage. So it was with apprehension that I went to see Ram Gopal Varma’s Agyaat, which thankfully turned out to be more of a suspenseful adventure thriller than a spook fest.
Ramu keeps his Phoonk formula aside and ventures into the jungle to whip out a film that cross-breeds the Hollywood hit ‘Predator’ and the low-budget ‘The Blair Witch Project’, with some obviously expected smattering of desi masala in the form of item numbers thrown in.
So we have Nisha Kothari - now rechristened Priyanka – dropping her clothes to do the jungle jig to add some titillation to the scares. Absolutely no complaints about that. But hey! The film just goes on moving in concentric circles after the first death. There seems to be no story here; just a series of averagely conceived killings.
A film crew of about a dozen goes into a dense jungle to shoot. When the camera breaks down, they decide to take a trip into the unknown wild. But the camping trip turns into a nightmare when their guide is mysteriously killed. So the crew - comprising of a semi-clad heroine (Priyanka Kothari), a leering hero (Gautam Rode), the quirky director (Howard Rosemeyer), a south Indian producer (Ishrat Ali) and assistant director (Telugu star Nitin) among others - is left stranded in the maze of the jungle with an Agyaat killer on their trail.
Who, if anyone, will survive the killing fields?
Must say Ramu chose a very good location for the film. A dense jungle with only streams of light peeping in from above the treetops and all the strange noises of animals of the wild combine together to make an apt background for the film. If only the actors could live up to the ambience. Priyanka Kothari mostly wears two expressions on her face - sensuous and scared. Nitin is perhaps the only actor who delivers a credible performance. The rest mostly end up hamming.
But more annoying than performances is the background score (Amar Mohile) that gets blaring to the point of clearing your ear of all the darned wax. The item song at the very start of the film isn’t much of a gem.
‘Agyaat’ doesn’t exactly keep you on the edge of your seat. Yes, there are a few scenes (mostly when the anticipation of what’s going to happen is building up) that give you goose flesh. But mostly, the so-called scary scenes end up making you smile rather than sending a shiver down your spine.
Movie Review : Entertains without scaring (3/10) A confession at the outset. I don’t scare easy. You can let loose a ghost on me and minutes later find me giving him a face mass...
Agyaat - Movie Review
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Priyanka Kothari sweats out in jungle
