Roohi

Roohi (2021) : Movie Review :

In 2018, Maddock Studios amd Director Amar Kaushik established an idea of Horror-comedy genre in bollywood with a blockbuster movie 'Stree' and since then there hasn't been any film going close to it. The same production house decided to convert it into an horror-universe and that's where the idea of Roohi was born with different parents, i mean different writers and director. Unfortunately, the idea is completely destroyed by the new guardians and the child is born lame this time. Roohi just didn't fail to understand the criteria of horror-comedy but also fails to deliver the content even in Horror and Comedy individual genres.

Roohi is a story of an young girl named Roohi (Janhvi Kapoor) who is haunted by the ghost called Afza. The infamous duo of crime reporters played by Rajkummar Rao and Varun Sharma kidnaps Roohi to marry her with someone against her will, but then both of them falls in love with her from different point of view. This creates a confusing yet hilarious narrative which ends up on a pathetic note where neither one of them makes sense. Roohi falters in keeping the engaging elements alive because of outdated an forceful regional humour. The writing tries too hard to bring intentional laughter but fails miserably due to the poor structure of it.

Performance wise, Janhvi Kapoor is the name who actually gets something in sense of acting because of the dual role she plays. She looks cute as Roohi and the exact same horrible in Afza's get up, so the variable nature makes her character interesting. Somehow the soulless construction and less dialogues reduces the quality of work which is highly disappointing. Talking about the crazy duo of Rajkummar and Varun, yes the chemistry and bromance is enjoyable at some occasions, thanks to the slapstick one liners but both of them don't actually get anything to showcase their acting talent. The supporting cast is strictly average, nothing to be mentioned here.

Roohi is not a long film but it looks long because of boring narrative. The comedy factors aren't high and the horror show is poor as well. Most of the times it leaves audience in predictable situations therefore the excitement for the upcoming scene is never built. When something seems to feel interesting towards the end (of course because we realise that it is going to end soon), it shuffles the entire plot in completely different direction where the dead end is absolutely childish. Dialogues are over humourous with extra regional accent while some of them are not even understandable. Director Hardik Mehra picks a blunder to carry forward the excellency of 'Stree' but he forgets that it was directed by a sensible director like Amar Kaushik who knew exactly what to do with the script. The biggest difference between Roohi and Stree is the writer-director combo, and hopefully the makers would think about it with upcoming films in this horror-universe. Overall, Roohi is another disaster during the pandemic season and we certainly need a vaccine to survive the quality of bollywood movies.

RATING - 4/10*