Bhediya Hindi Movie
Director Amar Kaushik's Bhediya has many western influences, but a truly Desi theme Indianizes it. In terms of design and narration, this comedy with a gory story about werewolves in Arunachal Pradesh is somewhat similar to An American Werewolf in London. Like the Hollywood film, Bhediya oscillates from being a gory story to a funny and insightful one very quickly. The scenes showing how Varun Dhawan's character Bhaskar transforms into a werewolf are inspired from films of similar genre. Which is fine, because inspiration is not the same thing as lifting the entire plot in cinema.
The film also resembles Jordan Peele's Get Out in terms of how it uses familiar genre elements, like horror and adventure, to offer some commentary on deforestation. The film discusses how humankind poses the biggest threat to nature.
The title is a Hindi word for wolf that serves as a metaphor for how nature strikes back to protect itself. Varun Dhawan plays a greedy contractor who comes to Arunachal Pradesh with a project that involves deforestation. When he sets out to a forest area in Arunachal Pradesh to implement a major change or two there, a wolf bites him. Soon, he becomes a werewolf that cherry-picks his victims and kills them with a keen sense of vengeance. However, in some regards, the animal seems a lot more evolved than the man himself.
A bit like in Kaushik's last film, Stree, the design of Bhediya is only an accessory to the plot. In a case of role-reversal, Stree is about a woman ghost or a bloodthirsty witch prowling the streets for unattended men at night. Bhediya only plays out as a werewolf film, but authentic here is the material with an overarching message about deforestation. The film makes us wonder what the bigger sin is: the trial of blood that the werewolf leaves in its wake or the forest land that the contract workers pluck away?
Kaushik and his writer Niren Bhatt take care to ensure that the film does not become too preachy at any point. They sometimes rub a lot of the messaging here in our face, but the film keeps producing a clever line or two that maintains a mostly whimsical tone. Abhishek Banerjee, Deepak Dobriyal, Paalin Kabak, and Varun Dhawan act as if they do not take the film too seriously. Banerjee and Dobriyal have impeccable comic timing, and Dhawan is not too far behind them either.
Another reason Bhediya works big time is the VFX work and sound design. For a 60-crore film, the final output seems more than convincing at a visual and sound level.
MOVIE REVIEWS