House of many horrors | The Annapurna Express (original) (raw)

Don’t watch it alone! Or you’ll be holding hands with a total stranger sitting next to you in sheer fright. Arpan Thapa’s “Ghar” is that scary. Not exaggerating at all when we say that this has to be the scariest Nepali movie ever made, giving tough competition even to its Bollywood contemporaries.

Written and directed by Thapa, Shiva in the film, who is married to Saru (Surakshya Panta), Ghar is a story of the couple who move into a new house they get for cheap. Also moving in with them is Maya (Benisha Hamal), Saru’s cousin and Shiva’s extra-marital affair. Despite some foreboding, the family does not suspect the house they happily move into is haunted, not by one but two sinister ghosts!

What happens next is expected, yet the execution surpasses all expectations from a Nepali horror flick and upholds the reputation of Thapa, an actor and filmmaker who studied acting in Mumbai in early 2000s, brings along. For someone who watched Thapa lead on his debut Nepali movie, Murray Kerr’s “Sick City” (2011), and saw a promising talent emerge, his stint behind the camera this time does not come as a big surprise. His ability to hold together a script of a movie that has been shot almost 95 percent indoors, with a cast of under a dozen, is simply remarkable.

Under a dozen is all that Thapa needs to create this scare flick with the lead actress Panta marvelously excelling in her role as Saru, a lovable wife who adores her husband and is on her third trimester of pregnancy. If you’ve ever encountered a woman on her final stages of pregnancy, when hormonal changes and motherly instincts cause many mood swings, you will easily relate to Saru and will absolutely love Panta for her acting skills. When she is possessed and has to let out morbid screams, the intense changes in her demeanor are further testament to Panta’s talent as an actor. She definitely brings home the gold on this one.

Hamal, playing Maya, Saru’s jealous younger cousin, is almost unrecognizable at first in her role of a pot-smoking seductress. The actress who has previously played lead in Nepali movies looks comfortable enough in a supporting role this time. Thapa as Shiva doesn’t do nearly as much on-screen as he does behind the camera. Again, the film belongs to Panta.

But she still can’t take all the credit. Like a comedy, horror also calls for impeccable timing. Scare the audience too much and they stop being scared; scare them too little and they’ll find the film boring. Thapa, with his team of skillful cinematographers, editors, makeup artists and rest of the crew work out the perfect calibration. Besides them, Iman Bikram Shah, with his eerily haunting background score, needs a special mention as well.

The filmmakers have resorted to using ‘orthodox’ ghosts on this one to give the audience the chills. Ghosts from grandma’s stories that appear only at night, creep into your bed and smother you, move furniture to scare to you and possess you are unmistakably more frightening than watching a Catholic nun being possessed by the devil in the 1950s’ Romania. Add top-notch acting and continuous long takes to the childhood horror stories and they make for a perfect recipe for fright!

The only drawback, if it can be called one, is that both the film’s lead actors are not much into publicity. And neither is the production team. The result, the film lacks sufficient promotion and for a movie of this caliber, audience turnout is comparably low. Only if word-of-mouth works on this one.

Who should watch it?

If you like horror movies minus the stereotypical skin-show, item numbers and song and dance sequences, you will definitely enjoy Ghar. If you are not scared enough at the end of it, the end credits announce a sequel too.

Rating: 4 stars

GHAR (A)

Genre: Horror

Run time: 1h30m

Director: Arpan Thapa

Cast: Arpan Thapa, Surakshya Panta, Benisha Hamal