Review: 1920

It's a peculiar attempt, this 1920. Shooting in Yorkshire -- and passing a castle there as just a hansom-cab ride away from Mumbai -- the film clearly desires to replicate classic British period chillers. The man wears a three-piece suit, the woman is in modern-day approximations of what the art director mistakes for being Victorian, and they look more the exiled Baron and Baroness instead of the Thakur-Thakrain.

It is as if director Vikram Bhatt -- who made watchable films a decade ago, we hear -- wanted to create a stulted period atmosphere just to show other horror-makers that his work is, indeed, different. Unlike the Ramsays, his is a mansion, not a haveli. Unlike Ram Gopal Varma, his film relies on footsteps in silence, not sound-design boos. And with scratchy gramophones and the use of western classical music, he seems to be trying to show us how international his film is, how classy. How British.

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The sad fall-out of Mr Bhatt's stiff-upper-lip machinations, however, is quite simply this: In his concerted attempts to recreate a period English setting, he has managed to adequately conjure up just the stuffiness -- and has made a 'horror' film so dreadfully boring it would send James Ivory to sleep.

Debutant Rajneesh Duggal stars as Arjun Singh Rathod, a young architect who has found his dream project in an (obviously haunted) mansion that has to be torn down and made into a hotel. Meanwhile, his bride Lisa -- played by the atypically attractive Adah Sharma, likely cast because she looks anaemic enough to be a vampire'd out Countess --

is hesitant about this assignment, what with her penchant to chase after mysterious noises in the middle of the night.

So then we have a haunted mansion, a caretaker who knows better, and the local priest -- Father Thomas, I believe -- dealing with a case of eventual possession, after which we are taken into a 'back in the day' plotline (reminiscent of Bhool Bhulaiyya), something that flashbacks into malarkey about how, back in the 19th century, lady of the haveli Gayatri -- Anjori Alagh playing a patriotically horny trollop -- traps an evil soldier by seducing him. Because a knife in his back would have been too easy, you know.

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And so this patently unscary -- and really long -- movie drags on, testing your patience as absolutely everything goes on with uncaring, old-school predictability. It's like a half-hour script for a weak television horror episode cruelly yanked over full feature-length screentime, self-indulgently pretending it's better than random horror schlock because it's moody enough to contain dozens of repetitive silent moments. It isn't.

The climax is painful -- if you choose to think about it, which you really shouldn't.

The only thing scary about a film like 1920 is the fact that someone paid to produce it. Oo-er.

Rediff Rating: