Tamil cinema’s hottest genre—the horror-comedy—throws at us Darling-II this week. A deceivingly difficult genre to handle, horror-comedies demand fine craftsmanship from directors looking to deliver on both horror and comedy. But what we’ve been seeing in this rather oxymoronic genre are films that are essentially comedies that rely on horror for mere structure. This means that even though these films have their share of spooky scenes, the audience can rest assured that the film’s light-hearted goofiness will ultimately take charge. Isn’t that why we still watch films like Ghostbusters and Beetlejuice even today? Even Darling , for that matter, worked largely because of its comedy.
But Darling-II is more ambitious. Not only do the makers want you to keep laughing as this story about five goofy friends on a holiday unfurls, but they also want to narrate a dark story of lost love and treachery. It wants to be The Exorcist one minute and The Hangover the next… Unfortunately, it fails at being neither.
The film neither has interesting characters and set pieces to engage us with comedy, nor does it spend enough time to build up tension to send us sinking into our seats. The gags are lazy and predictable—one involves a Telugu man who can’t stop talking to his wife. Another is about a middle-aged man joking about how marriage has prepared him for ghosts.
Even scenes that could have worked as thrilling jump scares fall flat because of the director’s propensity to switch from colour to black-and-white or to frames of blood-red every time something dangerous is about to happen.
The narrative is driven forward entirely only by dialogues. For instance, if a man is shown sleeping during the day… we get three dialogues telling us 1) that he’s sleeping 2) he’s late for something and 3) he still hasn’t woken up yet.
So, by the time the film meanders to its ‘big reveal’, you’re too exhausted to care anymore. Add this film too to the list of films that killed a franchise. But wait, why did Darling need a second instalment anyway?
