Shaitaan Is Horrifying, But Not In The Way It Wants To Be

AT 11 in the morning, I saw a severed tongue fly across the screen. At around the same time, I witnessed a group of women hanging on to every word uttered by a middle-aged man, a dead rat lying very dead in a desolate forest, and a man wrecking havoc based on the conviction that he is god. Around then, my phone buzzed and three realisations occurred to me, one after the other: 10 years ago Queen had released on one such Friday and catapulted Vikas Bahl’s career to great heights — and he has not made a decent film since then. Shaitaan, his sixth directorial feature, only reaffirms this trajectory.

The film exists to unsettle. This intent is so strong that it becomes a need almost with Shaitaan stopping at nothing to showcase that it can stop at nothing. For instance, every time the outing fails to engage (a recurring occurrence), the filmmaker includes an uncalled for twist (kid falling from the roof, a knife slicing through someone’s hands) to pull us back in. It is a strangely self-serving exercise designed to evoke interest, no different from a kid doing somersaults in a room full of people as a last ditch effort to garner attention. The troubling bit is even these antics leave us cold.

Shaitaan is the latest addition to the Ajay Devgn father-verse where the actor portrays different iterations of the common man and channelises ordinariness as a superpower to protect his children. It is not wholly incidental that Aamil Keeyan Khan, the writer of Drishyam 2, Runway 34, Bholaa, is also the writer of the film. He even repeats the same problem. The ambition to prop up Devgn is so strong that everything else becomes a casualty: the story, the actors, logic and our sanity.

The premise is this: a stranger called Vanraj (R Madhavan) intrudes into a house and uses black magic to gain control of a young girl, Janhvi (Janki Bodiwala). Her parents, Kabir and Jyoti (Devgn and Jyothika) and her brother are reduced to bystanders, horrified at the sight. Vanraj’s objective of doing it is to take Janhvi along and sacrifice her with the rest of the young girls he has gathered at some forsaken place. This opens up for an uncomfortable two-hour rampage where a young girl does everything she is told to by a man. The “orders” become more and more perverse. It begins with him asking her to laugh uncontrollably, hit her father, and goes on to a point where she pees in her pants and Vanraj (Madhavan hamming it up like no one’s business) casually asks her to take them off. In case you are wondering, Shaitaan goes ahead with it and mimics the same God-complex it had probably set out to critique.

For most of the duration, the film halts at nothing really. The pattern is familiar till it becomes headache-inducingly repetitive. Vanraj asks Janhvi to do something and she does it. Basic questions — like why he targets young girls, where does he come from, what is his bigger motive — are left unanswered. The premise almost becomes a playground to display the subservience of a young girl at the behest of an unhinged, evil man, only for another man to avenge it. This makes for a deeply uneasy experience with little to no payback. The stakes keep rising and rising only for inflated heroism to take centrestage with the film cruelly and carelessly sidelining the women in this tale of unnecessary bravado.

The third realisation I had while watching Shaitaan was the irony of watching a Vikas Bahl film on International Women’s Day. Here is a filmmaker who had been accused of sexual harassment during the #MeToo movement, carrying on with his career like nothing ever was the matter. Here is a big male superstar backing his film with his name and money (Devgn is one of the producers), and here we are, sitting on the other end of the screen, drily replying to all the “happy women’s day” messages on our phones. Shaitaan evokes little dread except egging us on to confront the ease with which society sanctions the abuse of women by doing little to nothing about the abusers — now that is a horror story.

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