Every time Bollywood tries to take their stories down south, be it Tamil Nadu or Kerala, they have this way of overdoing everything based on their shabby research, and we have seen the stereotype overdose in all those films. By the time I finished watching the latest horror movie, Maa, I was actually interested in knowing the reaction of people from Bengal about their representation in Bollywood. I don’t know Bengali, but after watching this movie, I have cracked the secret of speaking Bengali. Replace everything that has the phonetic “A” with “O,” and your Bollywood instant Bengali is ready. With an ultra-generic horror story treating its audience as dumb, this unsubtle Maa Kaali feminism seems like Kajol’s guilty pleasure demand after seeing Ajay Devgn’s atrocities in Bholaa. Why should husbands have all the green screen fun?
Our main character, Ambika, and her daughter had to visit a village named Chandrapur in West Bengal to sell off the ancestral property of Shuvankar, Ambika’s late husband. However, on reaching there, a lot of bad things start to happen, and what we see in the movie Maa is the history and reasons behind all those mishaps.
When Raj and DK wrote the first Stree movie, it had this wonderful layer of taking a jibe at society for restraining women, even though it was ultimately a comedy film. When it comes to Maa, the makers are doing this obvious Naari Shakti thing by making the leading lady a symbol of motherly love, and we have sequences where she is literally becoming possessed by Maa Kaali and fighting Rakshas to protect her child. The sentiments are understandable. But the loudness with which it is getting presented on screen with all those “10 Things a Mom can do when she is angry” kind of lecturing dialogues, Vishal Phuria and the writers are just making it worse.
One of the mistakes that mainstream Hindi cinema, in general, repeats is the way they spoon-feed the audience with information. The writers are so insecure that they are not even giving the audience space to think about what will be going through the headspace of the characters. The concerns, the thought process, and the dilemmas are all literally being spoken by each character. The bizarre part is there is absolutely nothing new about the story idea or the beats of the script. Even after that, they are unsure about whether the people will get it without dialogue. The visual effects are pretty much tacky, and the physics of things, along with the bad rendering of CGI portions, very much makes it a spin-off set in the universe of Bholaa, even though it is forcefully trying to be in the universe of Shaitaan. We even get to see AI-generated footage as inserts in certain backstory portions.
One of the other irritating elements in the movie is the way they underestimate the curiosity of a 12-year-old. They are making the character of the daughter conveniently naive. She has an understanding of periods, and she even questions who celebrates periods. However, the same individual can’t recognize a spooky place and apply common sense and stay away from there, even after her mother had told her not to leave without informing her. The kid who sat behind me, who was clearly below or around 12, was speaking to the character not to do stupid things. The cinematography uses this two-color palette, shuffling between blue and red to emphasize the dominance of characters in scenes. But the exhausting and cliched trajectory of the movie doesn’t deserve that kind of visual craft.
Kajol gets to be in this dialogue-heavy dramatic zone with this character. The pace with which the movie is progressing is not really allowing her to make the pain and angst believable on screen, and the demand here seems to be more physical as there are so many stunts. The casting of Ronit Roy as the village chief itself is a filmmaking mistake. SPOILER ALERT! Anyone with common sense would know that the second-biggest name in the entire star cast can’t be there for a mere supporting role. His accent feels pretty fake, and the backstory is just your routine stuff. Indraneil Sengupta and Dibyendu Bhattacharya are part of the cast in roles with minimal screentime.
If you have enjoyed movies like Shaitaan and Bholaa (I was not a fan of both), there is a good possibility that you might find this movie passable. Even then, the chances of you finding any sort of cinematic takeaways are really slim. The only possible memory I will have about this movie is a collective laugh among the audience when Kajol starts to dance in one of the songs towards the climax.
