Andhar Maya, Creepy But Far From Compelling

Rating: **

 Andhar Maya  on Zee5 in  7 episodes in Marathi,  has a  tonally felicitous  feel to it.  You feel you are  in the midst  of something  ominous, something eerie . But the series never  reaches the culmination  that it seems to  promise initially when an  entire  clan of property seekers descend  after the death of  the patriarch in Konkan village.

This is well trodden  territory. For it to  impress  us, there needed to be  far more  enormity in  the content. Director Bhimrao Mude  and his  writers  adhere to  familiar  terror tropes  like that  patent someone-is-watching camera  angle  that is here pushed in  anytime  there is  a scarcity  of genuine moodiness, and that is   quite  frequently.

 The  well-known Marathi actor  Kishore Kadam  pretty much holds the  show together,  although there  are  way too many closeups of his face expressing an unnecessary  grotesquerie  His role gets  progressively ghoulish  until we reach the closing episode where a heavily pregnant  woman is  spooked much more than the audience.

The  crux of the  crisis in Andhar Maya—and there is genuine  absence of consistency in the fear factor—is that we never feel the fear that the  old ancestral home  supposedly secretes. Instead we get actors acting scared rather than feeling it.

There is the  core issue of  the  property’s deceased  owners   gender ambivalence.  The  man  used to perform  on stage in drag and apparently  maintained his drag act even at home. The  writers(Kapil  Bhopatkar,Pralhad Kudtarkar) forfeit  any  serious exploration of gender conflicts  beneath the surface scares.

 The crumbling ancestral home remains the  star of the show. As a warning for those inheritors  who  are in a  hurry to sell of their ancestors’  nurturing premise, Andhar Maya  just about passes muster. As a  spook vehicle it  fails  miserably.  For no fault of its own. When  you  allot  just one ominous crumbling venue and very little  of any other ingredient  that  goes  into  the  making of a notable horror experience, this is what we  get. Take  it or leave it.