The Wife Doesn’t Stand A Ghost Of A Chance

The Wife(Zee5)

Starring Gurmeet Chowdhary , Sayani Dutta

Directed by Sarmad Khan

Rating: * ½ 

There is a house-help named  Anjana who  keeps looking at her  boss in a too–dutiful way. In one sequence while  she collects his clothes  for  washing she  sniffs at  his  teeshirt .Before she could find his  underwear she  calls it a day. No wonder a little later  she finds something  very  precious churning  in  the washing machine.We can call it a clothes shave.

I wanted to know about Anjana Marathe’s  smothered  passion for her  maalik. Is  she  a  Shiny Ahuja   fan? It was more interesting than anything else in this routine humdrum bland and  showy horror  thriller about a  couple Varun and Arya(Gurmeet   Chowdhary and  Sayani Dutta) who move into a sparkling new highrise apartment.

Things soon start moving. And I don’t mean the near-inert pace of storytelling where many  sections seem  to  be rudderless, as  though the director forgot to  order ‘cut’ , so the camera  just kept rolling, as do our eyes in utter disbelief  at how unexciting   the  bhoot route taken can be if placed in the  wrong hands.

There are endless shots  of  cups on tables,  water dripping from sinks, chimes in the livingroom, clocks on  the mantel, milk in the fridge meant  to  generate  a feeling of foreboding.Nothing happens until very late  in  the  script when a knowledgeable  psychic  and her  gyani sidekick enter  Arya  and Varun’s home  with the  promise of shaking things up.

About time.

“There is  a  spirit chasing your husband  and  it won’t go away even if  you move into  another home,” is  the  depressing prophecy  by  the   knowledgeable  psychic who comes home  to rid the couple of  the  nasty spook  who it seems  is  the dead  -first wife of the hero come to haunt him.When  Varun reminds  his  wife that her life is  in danger she  laughs, “It’s  okay. If I die you can  get a third  wife.”

That’s just  about the  only  funny line in a creepy film where nothing happens most of the time except  that  a(red)  cup  slips off a table and breaks. Later we  see  characters drinking from the same(red) colour cups with one cup being blue. Extra points  for continuity. If  only we knew where this was heading.

Does this make  any  ‘séance’?  Not much, I am afraid.In fact there is nothing to be afraid  of  in this DOA  feature film , one more  has-been/never-been dumped on  the  OTT platform  with  no  reason for being there  except that someone  decided to be scary. I will think about it when I  stop laughing.

Gurmeet Chowdhary  has a good screen  presence. He  deserves better . So do we.