Director: Nagaraj Khandagal
Cast: Maruti Surya, Jai Ganesh, Stephen Arun Raj, Akshathaa
Shh…Eccharike aspires to be a horror film and tries quite hard to scare you. However, forget fear, the film actually makes you laugh out loud at various points. An amateur attempt at filmmaking, Shh.. seems like a product of some quick research about what horror films must constitute.
An old spooky house that has to have an attic, a doll and preferably a cabinet that can host it, an eager, young couple who move into this house with their children, unheeding kids walking around the house at night chancing upon the ghost, and then of course an exorcist who will arrive right in the end to send the ghosts away- Shh…Eccharike has all of it.
For a minute, let us ignore the fact that the director has unapologetically culled some classic and popular elements of any horror plot and blindly inserted them into his film.
Now, all he had to do was come up with a good story for the ghosts so that the torment they inflict on the couple and their children has some basis to it. Nagaraj Khandagal comes up with the most ridiculous raison d’etre for his film and fails in the one task that he had to do on his own. One patiently waits until the climax to understand the reason behind the fury of these mayhem-causing spirits. But when you find out what actually happened, you are not only disappointed, you are also terribly amused.
The awful performances of the actors make the entire experience even more harrowing. The husband is hardly shocked when a doll knocks at the door and the wife, in an amusing contrast to the husband, cries and clutches her children whenever she hears the slightest sound in the house. Together, they are rather entertaining (not intentionally, of course). The camera work does not spare you either.
There are unending shots of the camera journeying through the length and breadth of the house which serve no purpose whatsoever. But the real highlight of the film is the poorly imagined ghost. With strange make-up slapped on their faces, the ghosts look funny. In fact, the ghost of the child looks like a bad version of the aliens in James Cameron’s Avatar.
Parts of the plot also seem to be lifted from James Wan’s Insidious, especially the scenes involving the attic and the ghost’s obsession with the child.
Shh… is a poor attempt at telling a story we have heard many times. And the horror of sitting through it is really not worth it. Come to think of it, it is rightly titled after all.
