Rajkummar Rao, Janhvi Kapoor, Varun Sharma, Manav Vij, Alexx O’Nell, Sarita Joshi
Roohi movie director: Hardik Mehta
Roohi movie rating: One star
In the 2018 ‘Stree’, Bollywood gave us A Ghost Who Walks, her twisted ‘ultey’ feet leaving tracks of gleeful subversion in the small town she haunts. A few hiccups notwithstanding, ‘Stree’ was a sharp feminist comment on the age-old fear of strong, desirous women. With the same producer and lead actor toplining ‘Roohi’, this week’s new release in theatres, I was hoping for an encore. Sadly, Dinesh Vijan-Rajkummar Rao’s horror-comedy is just plain horrible, with not one laugh insight.
There’s nothing funny about ‘pakdaai shaadi’, in which young women are kidnapped and forced into unwanted marriages. Every time a film decides to bring it up, it makes you cringe. Why would a film in this day and age want to give space to this ‘tradition’ that should have been deep-sixed long back? ‘Roohi’ spends too much of its opening in setting up one such ‘kidnap’, for the benefit of a naive, open-mouthed ‘gora’ (Alexx O’Neill), which brings together a couple of small-town layabouts, Bhawra (Rajkummar Rao) and Kattani (Varun Sharma), and a shy young woman Roohi (Janhvi Kapoor), and deposits them in the middle of a jungle, for no good reason. A muscle-bound hood (Manav Vij) shows up once in a while. Why? We never quite get it. The characters mumble, and fumble, and it’s all a jumble.