Starring - Kapil Jhaveri (Ishq Vishk, Saawan... The Love Season), Shabana Raza (Karam, Fiza), and Ranjha Vikram Singh (Hostel, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel)
Release Date - 2006
Genre - Horror
Tagline - "Death walks at midnight"
Format - Bluray (Personal Collection) (Screener)
Rating (out of 5):
I owe a lot of my love to Bollywood and Hindi horror to Mondo Macabro. They were not the company that introduced me to these films but this company single handedly kept me in supply of them. I love their library of Bollywood films and look forward to every release sent over for review. A few weeks back Mondo Macabro sent me several of their new releases to review and one of them just happened to be the Hindi horror Aatma, or The Ghost, from 2006. This is one I had heard of before but never had the chance to check out until now. I want to thank Mondo Macabro and CAV for sending this one along for review!
The film follows a young woman from a wealthy family who finds herself married to a well renowned doctor. Sometime after their marriage he is confronted by some thugs and forced to sign a falsified death certificate. The spirit of the deceased vows revenge and possesses the young woman in order to get to her husband.
I went into this one very excited only to find myself extremely underwhelmed. I seriously wanted to like this one but it was clear that the charm that made the 80s and early 90s Hindi horror so much fun was long gone by the 2000s. The acting in this one is not campy or cheesy as the other Bollywood horror that I've reviewed. These performances are serious but not necessarily better. The characters are severely cliched and generic which made the characters very unlikable. The cast does very little to give these characters any sort of personality. The story for this one is very predictable. It reminded me a lot of the previous Bollywood and Indonesian horror films that I recently reviewed. We follow someone young and pretty that is possessed by something evil due to the sins of someone else. It's predictable and not that thrilling. I seriously wish the film had more originality. Finally, I really did like the make-up effects that we get along with the look of several scenes. With that being said, the deaths, at least the ones we can see, are not that fun. Much like most of the film, we have zero originality and amazing effects. Overall, Aatma is a forgettable film that gives the viewer absolutely nothing. I wanted to like it but it was a tough one to finish. Skip it.
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