REVIEW: 1920, not meant to be watched alone

Eerie winds, moaning sounds emanating from supposedly vacant rooms, mirrors cracking are all clichés of the horror genre. Yet, a spooky movie would be incomplete without these. What matters in the end is how well the story is told, and director Vikram Bhatt has just raised the bar for Hindi horror films with 1920.

Complete with the sound of footsteps and doors that creak, Bhatt has come up with a fairly convincing story of ghosts and exorcism amidst love, lust, treachery and betrayal in the pre-Independence era.

IT ALWAYS BEGINS WITH AN ISOLATED HOUSE…

The year is 1920, and promising young architect Arjun (Rajneesh Duggal) and his wife Lisa (Adah Sharma) move from Bombay to Palanpur for a job that has been assigned to Arjun. The job is to pull down a stunningly beautiful castle in Palanpur, and build a magnificent hotel in its place, specifically to attract the British.

With the clichéd housekeeper who pretends he is hiding nothing, the couple make themselves at home in the castle. Trouble starts the very first night, when Arjun is asleep, and Lisa begins to feel a strange presence in the house.

Candles that go off on their own, mercilessly howling winds and groaning sounds from different places inside the house stir up the right atmosphere right from the beginning.

AND THINGS HAPPEN…

Lisa is very disturbed because of the mysterious happenings inside the house, while Arjun doesn’t give them much thought. Lisa goes to a church in and confides in the priest (Raj Zutshi), who visits the house and ‘blesses’ it.

Strange things start happening to him, and when Arjun leaves Palanpur for some other work, the ghostly presence starts working in full force, terrorising Lisa and ultimately taking control over her body.

NEXT PAGE: Satanic symbols and inverted crosses

MUSIC REVIEW: 1920