eRojuMovie

Punchline: beware of your TV

Banner: Adlabs Films Ltd & Big Pictures

Genre: Thriller/Horror

Cast: R Madhavan, Neetu Chandra, Sachin Khedekar, Murli Sharma & Poonam Dhillon

Story:
Manohar (Madhavan) is a civil engineer and he lives in a joint family. They buy an expensive apartment 13B in a plush locality and start living in it. Spooky things start happening to Manohar. The lift doesn’t work whenever he gets into it. He is unable to fix the portraits of Gods in pooja room. His family members are obsessed with viewing TV serials. He finds out that there is one TV serial called ‘Sab Khairiyat’ that is played at 1 am/pm everyday. And whatever happens in that TV serial comes true in the lives of his family members. Spooked by it, he starts investigating and realizes that some spirits are trying to a make a contact with him through TV.

Actors:
Madhavan is exceptionally good in the role of protagonist. Neetu Chandra is adequate. Poonam Dhillon is fair. Sachin Khedekar did the role of a doc in a convincing way. Murali Sharma is adequate.

Technical departments:

Story:
Story of the film is interesting and this kind of horror flick was never made in India so far. The spirits communicate with the protagonist through electronic appliances about their presence and in turn they make him do the job for them. It is a pretty good story with an interesting premise.

Screenplay – direction:
Screenplay of the film is bad in the first half and interesting in the second half. Direction is adequate in parts. The director could not convert an interesting story into a gripping movie because of lack of emotional impact in the film. The movie is marred by repetitive scenes and uninteresting narration. The runtime of the film appears lengthy for a story like this. There are many unconvincing things in the film like –
1. The ladies in the family are so dumb that they never realize about their own real-time story is being aired on the TV.
2. There is no finishing to the blind-man character (It has some mysticism to it)
3. Why does lift continues to non-cooperate with protagonist even after he realizes that spirits are communicating with him.
4. Why didn’t the protagonist shift the entire family to some other place once he realizes that spirits are bound in the 13B flat only.
5. How come the protagonist shows up in the climax part of the serial when it involves the characters from the past?

Other technical departments:
Cinematography by PC Sreeram is exceptionally good. He experimented a lot with the photography in the film and it’s superb. There is color grading to the film and they maintained sepia tone for most of the film. Background music is also good. But at times, it appears over the board. The two songs in this film are completely unwarranted for. Editing is adequate. Dialogues are natural.

Analysis: First half of the film is little boring. The way story unfolds in the second half is good. But the flashback episode and the climax is not shot in a gripping manner. The plus points of the film are story, cinematography and Madhavan. The negative points are inconsistent screenplay and runtime. Though it has an interesting plot point, 13B fails due to lack of gripping narration.