Bhediya: Varun Dhawan, for all his earnestness & eagerness, looks hardly convincing as a werewolf

Varun Dhawan—bless his  bleeding soul—is  attacked in a very special place. I mean Arunachal Pradesh and not his posterior. Bitten in his backside by a voracious bhediya, Varun acquires wolfish traits, like getting all turned on by the smell of blood, and enjoying feasting  on his friends, and I do mean ON and not WITH his friends, not to mention howling without watching Unchaai.

For Varun turning into a werewolf entails cheap orange contact lenses and a look of acute  aggression that suggests he is upset with his trainer for turning up thirty minutes late. For company, Varun has Abhishek Banerjee who plays Varun’s cousin on an expedition in Arunchal Pradesh, which involves extensive deforestation.

“You  will have to pay,” warns Deepak Dobriyal, who is funnier than the entire cast and its prosthetics put together. Dobriyal is a curious cross between a spiritual soothsayer and a  local nutcase.

And it is  wonderful to see an Arunachal actor Paalin Kabak cast as Varun’s local friend and guide. Kabak, a fine actor with a serene presence sorely needed in the over-the-top mood of this  hyper-ventilatng horror comedy, gets a moving monologue on North Easterners being stereotyped in their own country as “Chinese”.

I wish the screenplay (Niren Bhatt) had focused on the alienation of the North East in a lighthearted manner (a sort of breezy antidote to Anubhav Sinha’s Anek) rather than  meandering into an alarming primitivism that would have been a hoot were it not such a howl.

Dhawan, for all his earnestness and eagerness to break new ground looks hardly convincing as a werewolf, especially since he insists on keeping his boxers on during the transformation from man to wolf.

A wolf in sheep’s clothing, I guess. I mean, a boxer just decimates all the scares of a wolf on the prowl. This is as good a place as any to say that the wolves are better actors than the human in this bhediya-dhasaan (willinilly) horror-humour fest, replete with absolutely ugh scatological jokes (Bannerjee and Kabak collecting Dhawan’s  stool in a sequence  where  Sourabh Shukla and Varun Dhawan take a split-screen dump), not forgetting the lurid references to cannibalism which Armie Hammer may  enjoy on a lazy Sunday when he has no one to text.

Kriti Sanon shows up whenever she has time to spare as a vet with a deep dark secret. Incidentally, her character had appeared in a dance sequence in Stree. Without giving away her secret ,let’s just say Kriti has never played such a character before. One hopes she  never does anything similar in future.

Bhediya is a film which kids may enjoy provided they are restricted from watching werewolf films from Hollywood. Bhediya is absolutely harmless and scare-proof. It has those funny-scary vibes of Stree but none of the dread of the unknown, and just to ensure we don’t miss the road signs, director Amar Kaushik even employs some of the Stree actors to remain in the mirth-fright mood .

Great planning has gone into giving the presentation a relevance beyond its patent  projection of a pert primitivism. The references to eco-devastation are hard to take seriously when the hero has lines like, “Meri sachchi mein phat rahi hai.” It all seems like a Halloween party gone horribly wrong. Everyone tries hard to make you feel invited. But the mood is all messed up. Nothing is as it seems in Bhediya. The characters are pumped up with excitement. But hell, where is the party?

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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