Ghost Stories- A Review★★★

After previous anthology movies like “Bombay Talkies” and “Lust Stories” our fab four turns their head into the genre of horror with the latest Netflix release “Ghost Stories”. Like the previous ones this movie also consists of four stories directed by Zoya Akthar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banarjee and Karan Johar. Let’s discuss and review the four stories.

Zoya Akthar- The major premise for Zoya’s story revolves inside a house where a nurse Sameera played by Janhvi Kapoor is on her duty to take care of an old lady Mrs Malik played by Surekha Sikri. Surekha Sikri’s errie look and appearance certainly brings the spookiness to the story. We feel invested in the story and Janhvi Kapoor with her dialects and decent acting shows some improvement from her previous works. 

Anurag Kashyap- Anurag’s story is the most mind bending one among the all with many visual symbolisms and metaphors. Anurag chooses the de-saturated theme with hard to detect colors present in the story. Shobita Dhulaptia plays a pregnant lady who stays with her husband and looks after her nephew after school. The kid is very much attached to her Maasi-Shobita and this turns into kind of obsession. Shobita in other hand is also shown slightly deranged with her doll room where she talks with the dolls giving out the errie vibes. Many metaphors to crows, vultures seemed similar to that of Black Swan at sometimes. This story is quite hard to decipher with bizarre sequences.

Dibakar Banerjee- This is the most interesting and best story among the three in my view. The story starts when a guy visits to a village of Beesghara and finds himself trapped with a boy and a girl. A zombie theme with one powerful beast like creature among them who feeds on the weaker which began according to the story after “Saughara people started to eat Beesghara”. The movie is just more than the zombie outbreak, it highlights the issue of socio-political injustice, and subtly hints the differences due to ranks and power. Gulsan Deviah on his real form with his body language and minimal dialogs was very convincing to scare you.

Karan Johar- It was however frustrating to end the series with a rather low note with Karan Johar’s part. The lavish weddings, designer lehengas and rich mansions with rather generic plot and jump scares. It was a decent attempt by Johar but fails flat when compared to the other three.