31 Days of Asian Horror: Agyaat (2009)

I’ll admit, I’ve watched little to no Indian/Bollywood dramas or movies, and Agyaat is definitely the first horror for me to run across. I figured I’d give it a try because it fit today’s theme (Film Maker Tuesdays) and wanted to branch out of my comfort zone in where I usually watch for Asian horror. Netflix has sort of a sizable collection of Indian movies and dramas on their site, so it was pretty easy for me to find something that seemed interesting.

Directed by Ram Gopal Varma, Agyaat is set in the jungle where a film crew is working on a project. The lead male actor is over the top and conceited, the crew largely consists of amateurs, and there become several problems that effect the shoot which causes the group to have several days of free time. They decide to tour the jungle during this downtime where the meet an entity that starts killing them one by one.

I’m not going to lie to you, it was pretty hard to watch this movie in the very beginning. It was largely boring for me and I ended up zoning out for a long time before realizing I was still watching it. I do like the idea of what the movie was trying to do in the beginning, as it was deliberately campy so that when the entity starts to kill the tension ramps up, but for the most part none of the characters were likeable or interesting enough for me to care whether they died or not and just generally felt apathetic about caring. And usually that doesn’t bother me, I don’t have to like a person to be able to follow them, but no one was even interesting. I think the problem was that’s all we were doing for 40 minutes, rehashing and drilling in what type of people this group was, when it didn’t need it to spend that much time setting it up. Especially when they were deliberately one-dimensial caricatures.

I do think when the movie finally started to get into the horror is where it started to settle into the story and I was able to enjoy it a lot more, but it took too long to get there. The first half barely even had the mention of the spirit/thing that hunted in the jungke. Almost every “scare” came from the movie they were shooting. Even when the movie finally became a horror movie it mirrored the first part in that it was the same kind of thing over and over with out very much payoff. The intrigue of the entity wasn’t enough to keep me fully invested and while you could see where it was supposed to go, it just wasn’t getting there. There were a lot of missed moments that could have helped flesh out the script more and make this more of an appeal, but in the end it fell flat.

Agyaat is currently streaming on Netflix.

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