Bhoot Part One The Haunted Ship Movie Review : Fear meets involuntary comedy in this film by Vicky Kaushal.
For Bollywood, the recipe for a horror movie is simple: creepy makeup with blood splashes, a background soundtrack and a few well-dosed scares. Director Bhanu Pratap Singh’s first film, Bhoot Part One: The Haunted Ship, starring Vicky Kaushal, refuses to tinker with the formula. The best you can say about Bhoot is that it’s not as funny as some of Ram Gopal Varma’s big screen movies, but it makes you laugh involuntarily at many moments.
As the name implies, there is a ghost, of course; a scary rag doll – well, because Anabelle – with buttons instead of eyes; and an old teacher who conducts brave experiments to deal with supernatural powers and then sings mantras to chase away the ghosts. And then there’s our hero, Vicky Kaushal, who shows great talent as he tries to solve the mystery of a haunted ship.
Inspired by a true story, the film opens with the Sea Bird, a huge boat that docks at Mumbai’s Juhu Beach with no one on board. While the ship’s officers joke and say “yeh jarur padosi desh ki saajish hai”, things get complicated when a couple who wants to play a meaningless game of hide-and-seek on the abandoned ship disappears. Meanwhile, a grieving officer, Prithvi (Vicky), struggling with a personal loss, finds meaning in his life by discovering the truth about the Seabird. Will he be able to discover the secrets? Will he come out of it alive? This is the basic premise of the film.
This is certainly not a surprising experience for those brave enough to have seen exceptionally effective horror movies like The Conjuring or Lights Out. I even heard someone in the audience say that Bhoot is rather an episode of the horror series Aahat.