Psycho

Story: Meera (Priyanka) is a simple girl from a middle class family. Her life goes for a toss when she unknowingly befriends a stranger, Nikhil (Raj), who turns out to be an obsessive stalker.

Movie Review: The movie feels like an 86 minute long sequence of trembling handheld POV shots. While the narrative flow is straight as an arrow, the camera seems to be on oscillating mode all through. There isn’t a single scene when the frame stays still and all the shakiness does add an unsettling sense of drama to even the most mundane of episodes.

In one scene, we have Meera refusing to meet a perspective groom suggested by her parents. While she keeps saying no to everything her parents say, even as she keeps ignoring a barrage of text messages from her stalker, the camera stays under the glass dinning table giving you a very wobbly under the table perspective of the episode while the background score keeps pounding away at a very high BPM (beats per minute).

In another episode the camera keeps rotating and quivering all around Meera as she makes a run to a hospital after receiving a phone call. It’s only after a couple of minutes and a bit of thumping back ground score – while the camera follows Meera through the hospital walkways - that it revealed, her kid brother met with an accident.

Seems like the debutante filmmaker wanted to attempt a shaky new way of portraying drama on screen. The only problem is that the camera movements end up being more dramatic than what’s running onscreen and gives you the impression that it was deliberately designed to be some kind of a test for the audience’s ability to stay zoomed in on the proceedings.

The plotline is so simplistic that it borders on lame. Nikhil meets Meera on a bus and a couple of meetings later begin to harass her. Neither does the movie offer revelatory conjectures about stalker behavior nor does it throw up any psychological insights on why helpless women silently bear such torture. The over dramatized ending – where Meera avenges herself by pouring acid on her tormentor – only goes to prove that all the thought went into invested in finding the weirdest camera angles.

The movie just ends up offering little more than an impersonal voyeuristic peek into the whole process of stalking. The bad lip synch suggests the movie was shot in Mumbai for a Hindi audience, so there is very little in terms of local connect as well. Save Priyanka’s acting, everything about the movie is a little too pretentious and indulgent, much like the performance of the psycho, played by Raj.

Note: Go prepared to watch a lot of shaky camera movements and blasting background score, and keep your ear phones and aspirin in tow.