Video movie story: The Tharle Gang, a bunch of five young content creators, set out to make a spooky video to celebrate their milestone of having hit a million followers. Off they go on a road trip to Odisha to check out one of the most haunted locations in the country, during a lunar eclipse, which they’d been specifically warned against. Does something sinister play out or is the ghost-lore just a load of bunkum?
Video movie review: Let’s be clear from the start – the horror genre is really not my cup of tea. Yes, I have seen most of the more popular Hollywood titles, thanks to the sibling with a strong affinity for all things spooky, especially slasher movies, but it’s not something I’d turn to for a movie outing. Still, Video made it to the list; primarily because of the team behind it. This was Blink maker Srinidhi Bengaluru's sophomore directorial and there was a sense of heightened expectation that he’d conjure up something interesting, yet off the beaten track yet again. His long-time pal and Blink collaborator Dheekshith Shetty was backing his vision, so it seemed like a film not to be missed. They were promising a very scary movie after all. Boy, was I wrong!
A still from Video
Much like Blink’s Oedipus complex, this time too, Srinidhi went with a core subject that could have had audiences squirming in their seats. Unfortunately, this one doesn’t have the desired impact, despite its grotesque nature. Also, unlike Blink, in which Srinidhi had seasoned actors at hand, for Video, he chose to go with a bunch of newbies; a strange decision given the subject at hand. The first half is dedicated to establishing the popularity of the five protagonists as content creators. Their content is quite sub-standard, yet for reasons best known to their ever-growing audience, they get to a million followers. This is a very tedious watch, honestly, but it only gets worse from here.
The mind-blowing video that they then plan to present their followers is about a trip to a haunted school, where a teacher is said to have killed a whole bunch of students. Lore is also that supernatural events occur at this site during lunar eclipses. Despite being warned off, the gang decides that a lunar eclipse is exactly when they should visit. They’d be in an out in only a couple of hours, they reckon. They’d planned all the shots well in advance after all. But once they get there, everything goes wrong, as pieced together later from the footage retrieved from the many recording devices they’d used.
Video was marketed as a spine-chilling horror drama and yet the only thing sending a chill down was the AC blasting at full fury in the movie hall. Srinidhi employed several standard tropes of the genre, an unsettling location, lighting, sound and sudden jolts in the camera work for jump scares, a mysterious evil and more, but absolutely nothing stuck the landing. It did not help that the motley bunch of actors could not muster a hair-raising moment onscreen. It got me wondering if Srinidhi’s intention was to make a horror spoof, because, for all the talk about how troublesome a lunar eclipse is, there’s not one shot of the moon.
The film’s been awarded an A certificate, which, my best guess is for the ‘taboo’ subject at the centre of the narrative. There’s some violence, but that doesn’t measure up to even a minute percentage of the level of human body mutilation unleashed onscreen in most films these days.
Video movie verdict: Video sets a very low bar for the found footage and horror genres. More than a decade ago, 6-5=2 did it so much better. This is a massive misstep for the filmmaker.
