Chhorii 2 is pretentious gobbledygook posturing as horror drama

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Take a social message on gender equality and the rights of a girl-child. Add lack of education and superstition in a village. Churn in age-old horror tropes and vendetta stories and a few cops to battle the baddies. Use prosthetics, make-up and what-have-you to “augment” the looks of the main characters (read victims). Bring in unexplained blips and bloopers galore, and you have Chhorii 2, a film that should not have been made in the first place for the resources it squanders and the lack of impact it has.

You may be justified being scared of a tinier-than-tiny spider, but if anything in this film frightens you, words will fail me!! Suffice to say that the few good to great horror films we have seen in Hindi cinema, like Bhoot, Stree, Darna Manaa Hai, Bhool Bhulaiyaa and a few others, would turn in their graves if those films were individuals, appalled that this film is classified in their horror genre!!

And when a mediocre film gets a sequel, I not only wonder how and why that is done but also pray that it makes the series worthwhile. For example, I was happy that Commando 2 was made after a lackluster Commander, and I personally did not like Fukrey at all but loved Fukrey 2. But I was nonplussed when an abysmal film like Chhorii got this sequel, which is even worse than the earlier film, if possible.

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Consider the backward village first where baby girls are instantly murdered. You wonder how the men do not think of perpetuating their race if there will be no women around 20 years later. The existing women, of course, are a docile part of the weird rituals as the young babies (why are some allowed to become a few years old and others killed at birth?!) are handed over to a mysterious freak, the Pradhan (village chief), who hides behind a sealed massive door.

And then of course, we have labyrinthine underground passages that are permanently lit, including with electricity, in a backward village!! Secret passages and a well with steps take you to the secret chambers that are employed by the villagers for their ghoulish ceremonies.

Not to mention the violence and a weird female Daasi Maa (Soha Ali Khan), who does not realize that she too is a slave even if she has been vested some powers! If you have endured Chhorii, you will know that the heroine, Sakshi (Nushrratt Bharuccha) has killed her husband, Rajbir (Saurabh Goyal) and escaped to the city with her newborn daughter, Ishani (Hardika Sharma). The couple, along with a helper, Rani Maa (Pallavi Ajay) are given a home by a police officer, Samar (Gashmeer Mahajani) and seven years have passed.

One day, out of the blue, Ishani is possessed by a ghoul and walks out of home when Sakshi is not there. A bewildered Rani Maa follows and both are bundled into a car and whisked away to the village (yes, someone in the poverty-stricken village also has a big car!!). CCTV on roads is employed and Samar and Sakshi reach the spot. And then Sakshi is whisked away. What happens next?

Chhorii 2 has the unique distinction of stretching (a) the climax (b) the post-climax and (c) the post-post-climax with one more “happening”. The rest of the film is about unspeakably gory or cliched tropes done to death—literally (of characters!).

Everything is supremely undistinguished in the film—the direction, writing, performances and the (non-existent) editing. The camerawork is good, in keeping with today’s norms. But this one swallow cannot make the Chhorii 2 summer. Oops! I forgot the main thing: Ishani’s skin is sensitive to the rays of the sun, and so is the pradhan’s.

See you then, at sundown, at the nearest pub to forget my sorrow after watching this one.

Rating: *

Amazon Prime Video presents T-Series Films’, Abunduntia Entertainment’s, Psych Film’s & Tamarisk Lane’s Chhorii 2  Produced by: Bhushan Kumar, Krishan Kumar, Vikram Malhotra, Shikhaa Sharma, Jack Davis & Vipin Agnihotri  Directed by: Vishal Furia Written by: Vishal Furia, Ajit Jagtap, Divya Prakash Dubey & Muktesh Mishra  Music: Adrija Gupta & Rob Della Fortuna  Starring: Nushrratt Bharuccha, Soha Ali Khan, Gashmeer Mahajani, Kuldeep Sareen, Saurabh Goyal, Pallavi Ajay, Hardika Sharma, Mukul Shrivastava, Imtiyazul Hasan & others

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