Mallika Review

Sanjana (Sheena Nayyar) is being agonized by dreams of a woman being strangled to death next to her. She doesn't know the meaning of these terrible visions, and so runs away and checks in to a fort-turned-resort in Rajasthan to relax. However, she keeps seeing a woman in white with peeling make-up, everywhere she goes - in her room, in her bathroom, in her dreams, and everywhere she looks. It's not surprising - given the rates these resorts charge, you really should watch out for people who'd hitch on to your room free of cost.

However, this apparition is pretty strange. In addition to making Sanjana scream loud enough to cause tremors on Neptune's moons, it also makes her imagine stranger stuff, like her friend Sahil (Sameer Dattani) jumping into a pool filled with blood, and a corpse staring at her from the ceiling. And it makes you imagine even stranger stuff, like time passing by. After what seems like about 3,689 hours of shrieking and random ghost-sightings, the film moves to the flashback.

We are told that the ghost is Mallika, a woman who looks just like Sanjana, and who used to own the fort some time back. In the past, Mallika was cheated on by her husband, and the night she found out, the husband revealed his true colours. He informed her that he married her just for her wealth, and then he tortured her to death, burying her under the fort soon after. Mallika then resorts to spooking random people in her thirst for revenge against her husband.

What follow are more haunting sights and sounds, and several innocents being finished off by the ghost, before Mallika kills her husband and leaves the fort for good.

Mallika, the movie, tries to start off on an interesting note. Its beginning is peppered with some teasing skin show of quite a few focused women; the kinds who'd consider it tough to multi-task between thinking and having clothes on.

It has some well-done frights, too. However, the story keeps flitting between the past, the recent past and the present, making it about as easy to follow as an EAMCET question paper with 30 typos in each question.

Sheena Nayyar seems to have been told to scream with careless abandon, while Sameer Dattani seems to have been told to listen - he looks quite indifferent. The other performances are pretty bad, especially those of the girls playing the bimbettes, and the actor playing Mallika's husband. Suresh Menon can tickle you only if you get tickled by the thought of him being able to tickle you.

The visuals are strangely cheesy at times. The ghost doesn't scare you as much as a few well-conceptualized scenes in the movie might - bathtub spooks and dead people in white are about as fresh as dinosaur tailbones, and the film relies a lot on these props. The soundtrack consists mostly of people's screams, but the makers manage to fit in a song or two, including a re-sung "Who Bhooli Dastaan".

In all, you could watch this one if you're indifferent to being indifferent.