A comedy of terrors

As a long-time horror-movie fan, I know how vulnerable such films are to genre-snobbery. When it comes to assessing their worth, people routinely put intellect before instinct: there is the well-documented phenomenon of viewers being genuinely affected by a horror film while they are watching it - and responding in exactly the ways that the director wanted them to - but then emerging from the hall and dismissing it as cheap escapism. This is a pity, because the immediacy of the movie-watching experience - that special thing that happens to us when we are in a darkened hall - is being overridden by post-facto analysis.

At the same time, it can be a mistake to judge a horror movie only by its ability to make you cringe in your seat, or to splay your fingers across your eyes. The fact is that cinema - by its very nature as a visual medium - can achieve such things with relative ease, given basic technical competence. But to be really satisfying and effective, a horror film needs as much rigour and internal consistency as any other type of film does. Watching the new movie Aatma, I was reminded that a few shock moments cannot compensate for slack dialogues and indifferent acting; if you can't invest in the characters, then beyond a point there is no visceral response to the film outside of those four or five "Boo!" scenes.

To begin with, Aatma knows something the cinema of horror has known for decades now - that there is nothing quite as terrifying as a sweet little girl, especially a sweet little girl who looks blankly into your eyes and says "I love you, mama" in a monotone. The story centres on such a girl, Nia, who is missing her father Abhay; we see things mainly through the worried eyes of her mother Maya (Bipasha Basu), who has refrained from telling the child that Abhay - a violent, abusive man - died in an accident. But now his ghost seems to have returned and is, to put it mildly, complicating their lives.

That is an acceptable enough premise for a horror movie, and this is a good-looking film in many ways, with some interesting - if derivative - things happening at the level of camerawork and framing: a showy tracking shot early on plays like a tribute to Kubrick's The Shining as well as some of Brian De Palma's 1970s work. But the minor flair for psychological tension that it shows in its early scenes isn't sustained. The story arc - in which the people who offer help to Maya are bumped off one by one - is not problematic in itself, but what could have been fine setpieces are listless in their execution, and most of the characters are underwritten and barely performed at all. Even seemingly little things contribute to the film's ineffectiveness, such as the scene where Nia's class-teacher sees a recently deceased boy walking the corridors and reacts by calling out "Paras! Paras!" in a flat, uninterested voice as she follows him around.

Tillotama Shome, who plays this part, is capable of better things, which is a reminder that screenwriters and actors working in horror films often get lazy, content to be foot-soldiers to the paisa-vasool moments. Thus, while Aatma has a couple of obligatory scary moments, it has many more slack "dramatic" scenes where indifferent writing meets (or facilitates) indifferent acting. "Nia, papa se baat kar rahe ho?" Maya asks in an expressionless tone when she sees her daughter talking to her ghost-dad on her pink toy phone. "Aur kya kaha papa ne?" She seems equally impassive after the grisly murder of her child's psychiatrist, and even manages a rueful little smile when she speaks with her colleague shortly after the body has been discovered.

It all becomes so tedious and uninvolving that after a point I began scripting my own little comic-horror skit to keep myself amused, even deriving fake thrills from the bizarrely fancy interior decoration in Maya's house. (What is with the TV set nestled in the belly of a big furry panda toy?) At one point the story's investigating police officer says, "I get a bad feeling about this." He might be speaking for most viewers, including - or especially - horror-movie fans.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi based writer