She wears all the costumes of modernity but carries a streak of attitude that shoves her back into dark medieval age. To her, do you know the best way to grind a rival into dust? Hard work? No. perseverance? No. staying at it? Don’t be naïve. All that is for losers. The foolproof way to make sure you stay on the top is, cue appropriate ghostly sound effects, kaala jaadu.
Or at least that’s what the desperate Shanaya( Basu) believes, when new heroine-on-the-block Sanjana(Gupta) starts to get ahead. Nothing that friend and lover and director of her films Aditya(Hashmi) can do is enogh to console her.Shanya wants Sanjana out of her way at any cost. And she finds an answer in black magic.
Bhatt is an old hand at horror, going back and forth in time, doing victrian and contemporary, and, on occasion, medieval. Here, he sticks to the here and now,making bollywoo the backdrop: the film industry,going by scores of unpublished, ear-scorching accounts, is the place where anything can happen. So we are quite prepared o believe that Shanaya’s bitterness and envy has caused her to come unhinged, and her passes at the guy who hands her the tools for sanjana’s destruction, lead to a couple of shivery moments in the first half.
The second half goes just the way so many fils do: down the chute. Or, in the instance of raaz 3, in that ‘in between place which are inhabited by prêt-aatmas. Right there, the little bit of frisson that the film managed to garner vanishes,maybe in that self-same place. Out come all the sadhus and babas with their mantras, and the bhagwan ki murti, and it all boils down to the same old battle against good and evil, borrowing from older horror topes from here and there.
Not only are the lines unintentionally hilarious, the characters are too. Especially the supporting cast, which ranges from a psychiatrist; a sorcerer with knowledge of kaalu jaadu whose pupil meets with a nasty ends, a murderous aatma who has the hots for a live woman, and so on. Excuse me while I choke.
As to the main leads, Bipasha being bad should have led to something. But neither she nor the relative newbie Esha Gupta, who teeters between getting somewhere with saying her lines and flubbing them, are anything but gym-toned clothes-horses. Poor Hashmi pendulums between both, and tries hard to look all serious and buttoned down. But hold, may be he is not so por at all as he gets to smooch not one but two lovelies. And that, dear readers is not a raaz at all.
Vashistha Ray.
