Review of Evil Eye: A Disappointing Eerie Tale

Evil  Eye(Amazon Prime)

Starring  Sarita Choudhury ,Sunita Mani, Omar Maskati,Bernard White .

Directed by  Elan & Rajeev Dassani

Rating: **

There is very little  reason why  we should sit through this  blindly fallacious  fear fare .Yes, there is one  good  performance. And it’s always a pleasure to watch Sarita Cahoudhary ever since she made her  memorable  debut opposite , ahem, Denzel Washington in  Mira Nair’s  MississippiMasala. We  don’t see her  often enough. But if this is  the  kind of cinema we  get to see her  in then we might as well not see her.

 The evil in Evil Eye  is  such a dispensable imposition that we are left looking at  a  plot that seems to have been  written  with  the sole purpose  of making super naturalism look cool.Regrettably the eerie twist at  the end is anything but convincing, let alone credible. The story works better as a mother-daughter  drama  with  the mother in Delhi   becoming progressively paranoid  about her daughter’s marriage to a “suitable match” in the US.

Here again  there is  a problem  of perception, as Sarita  Chowdhary and her screen-daughter  played by Sunita Mani  look  nothing like  mother and  daughter. This is in keeping with the  equation  evident  in the  other relationships: Ms Chowdhary and  her screen-husband(Bernard White )  don’t look like  a couple  and Ms Mani  and her boyfriend(Omar Maskati) are shown  faking the  bonhomie  until it hurts.

The focus is  on  the  emotional dynamics  of  the mother and daughter .The two actors struggle with  their  lines  during the telephonic conversation like actors rehearsing for an online  series  on  coping with Covid. 

The offering  is low on credibility  and high on stock  shocks from  supernatural thrillers .The slasher-styled  climax  is  so  ridiculous and  physically strenuous  that I  stopped feeling sorry for the audience and began to feel sorry for  the two actresses who  had to be  subjected  to  this embarrassing  trick-and-tweak  melodramatic monstrosity that’s ultimately  neither dramatic nor scary,simply funny.

The  dialogues  suggest no connection with  the way parents address  their  children’s  lives. Why does Sarita Choudhary speak to her daughter as if  she was getting her  cues from a  teleprinter? More  importantly , why propound blind faith , and that too in a film where  the actors  display scarce  confidence in in the  purported scares?