Bhoothakaalam movie review: Rahul Sadasivan’s Malayalam horror film, streaming on SonyLIV, stars Shane Nigam as a troubled young man and Revathy as his clinically depressed mother.
Kumbalangi Nights actor Shane Nigam’s first release in two years, Bhoothakaalam, is an excellent film made from incomplete ideas. Its outer shell is that of a haunted house horror film. But its actual concern is mental illness. Think Jennifer Kent’s 2014 Australian horror film The Babadook, in which the widowed protagonist and her son’s poor mental health manifests as the eponymous monster.
But The Babadook was a slightly different film. There, the supernatural horror aspects of the movie were inextricably tied to the film’s themes of dealing with trauma and grief. One facet did not work without the other.
In Bhoothakaalam, the horror angle and the mental illness angle just do not mesh well. One aspect of the film is stronger than the other, which makes the incompatibility between the film’s genre and concerns glaringly visible. Bhoothakaalam, out on SonyLIV, is two-thirds a drama about a clinically depressed mother and her troubled son’s dysfunctional relationship, which is extremely well-written-and-directed, and one-third a dull and formulaic haunted house movie.
As a result, writer-director Rahul Sadasivan and co-writer Sreekumar Shreyas are not able to fully realise both strands of the movie. The absent one-third of the mental health drama in Bhoothakaalam leaves some questions unanswered. Meanwhile, the absent two-thirds of the horror film left me unsatisfied.
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