When the opening credits of Sangili Bungili Kadhava Thorae roll out, I was reminded of Hollywood film Shutter. There are old-fashioned black-and-white photographs and in every picture, there’s one spooky element. A face peering out of the woods. A shadow lurking in the background.
Those are minor things when you study the ghost that haunts the protagonists in this horror-comedy. As with most recent movies in this genre, here too, a palatial house is haunted and the stars in the film will stay nowhere else.
There’s a reason for that, and we understand it a while after we get a peek into the main characters: Vasu (a full-of-josh Jiiva, who plays a house broker who gets deals done by cooking up false stories) and Swetha (Sridivya, who seems to have found a firm footing in homely roles). There’s a weak love angle between Vasu and Swetha but director Ike cleverly gives it very less screen space. After all, he has a huge haunted house full of funny characters to feature.
- Director: Ike
- Cast: Jiiva, Sridivya, Soori, Thambi Ramaiah, Radhika
That includes Soori, Thambi Ramaiah and a bunch of bumbling characters who’re all out to ensure that the theatre is filled with laughs. It is, for most of time.
SBKT is about how Vasu buys a palatial bungalow – the house of his dreams – after a long string of embarrassing run-ins with haughty house owners. It’s his sole goal in life – to make his mother (Radhika) comfortable in their own house – and he’d go to any length to make that happen.
For that, though, he has to battle the past. The house has seen good and bad – it was home to a loving family, we learn in the second half, before things went awry. And it is, unfortunately, left to Vasu to solve those problems and get his family back on track.
There are more laughs than horror in SBKT . Director Ike seems to have taken a lot of effort in making this a ‘family story’, rather than concentrate on the ghost angle. The overdose of characters does make some of the scenes tiring – there’s an unnecessary romance track for Soori and a flashback too late in the story – but director Ike manages to sustain some interest in the rest of the portions. He gets help from composer Vishal Chandrasekhar, who gets in a couple of peppy numbers (there’s even a song that goes ‘Ek Kissan Raghuthatha’!) and cinematographer Sathyan Sooran gets his camera angles right, especially during the horror sequences.
