Maharaja Hostel, the new Malayalam horror-comedy starring Instagram content creators Akhil NRD, Akhil Shah, and Sarath Babu in main roles, is a concept that failed to understand its potential. The structure of the story is the same old revenge-seeking ghost story. And there was a point in the second half of the film where I thought this movie would also have an interesting conflict similar to movies like Romancham or Prakambanam. But sadly, the movie doesn’t show any interest in exploring that possibility and decides to take the most generic trajectory. With the typical jump scares and extremely underwhelming and predictable events happening in the story, Maharaja Hostel even forgets why the movie was given that name.
Aravind, Midhun, and Varkey are three close friends who decided to join engineering after Plus Two. To cut costs, they decided to live in a cheaper private hostel named Maharaja Hostel. Aravind’s love interest was also studying in that college, and a challenge to win her love led to a scenario where the three boys had to encounter a ghost in a forest. How that incident changes their life is what we see in this movie.
SPOILERS AHEAD! A large percentage of the first half of this movie is extremely unimaginative. The usual plus two, college jokes are there, and I thought these content creators have made much better content on their Instagram reels. The movie is wasting a lot of time pointlessly in comedy scenes that add no information to the plot. Once the ghost episode begins, there is that obvious basic fun of seeing scared people. There is a point in the movie where two ghosts are in the picture, and it had a great opportunity to give a second layer to a usual ghost story. Sadly, when it came to the second half, the film completely ignored that possibility.
The writing of the movie seems to be oblivious to the reality that people are consuming a lot of content these days. One of the key characters in the movie is introduced in a certain way, and that introduction itself exposes the reality of that character. But Charu Wakan, who has written and directed this movie, feels that this is a matter of suspense and tries to reveal it at a later point. The last 15 or 20 minutes of the movie have this very hurried feel, and neither the jokes nor the horror in that part of the movie worked. The cinematography and edits use the same old jump scare method to keep things scary. There were moments, like the scenes that showed each of our heroes experiencing the ghost for the first time, that looked innovative. But none of it really evolved into anything good.
The three heroes, Akhil NRD, Akhil Shah, and Sarath Babu, are somewhat repeating their Instagram persona. Considering the writing of the movie, I would say they have tried their best to give it some elevation using their experience of creating reels. I think in the second half there are portions where these people have said counter dialogues using their creativity to make things more entertaining. Sajin Cherukayil gets to do a character that had a lot of potential to take the movie to a different zone. Unfortunately, it ended up being a mere comical add-on. Vinod Kovoor is there for merely two scenes. The female lead, Ann Maria, also doesn’t have too much to do here. Nna Thaan Case Kodu fame Chitra Nair and content creator Sandeep Suresh are the other notable names in the cast with minimal roles.
Towards the end of the movie, we hear a concluding statement as a voice-over which claims that our heroes did something, fixed something, and saved a land from a curse. And then you see these AI-generated visuals of prosperity. And deep down I was like, what happened to Maharaja Hostel? Somewhere I feel they wanted to make a horror story around a hostel but ended up creating a movie that wastes time in college and focuses more on a forest. While it is great to see platforms like Instagram creating film stars, it is sad to see people taking film writing for granted when it comes to creating movies featuring them. A similar recent example was Derby, which tried to pamper a shoddy script with too many content creators and influencers.
