EVEN a child can frighten a grown-up. The boy or the girl just has to jump from behind a wall shouting ‘boo’ and the unsuspecting you will most likely be startled. So it would be technically wrong to say ‘Drona 2010’, Shaji Kailas’s first foray into the realm of the supernatural, fails to scare. It does, in a childish way.
A true horror film follows you out of the theatre; it is a relentless stalker. Its shadows shatter one’s sense of wellbeing.
There are stories of how Americans stopped using the bathtub after watching Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’.
In that sense, there is no harm in watching ‘Drona 2010’.
The only feeling it might induce is anger, not because it tries to frighten unnecessarily, but because of its sheer lack of ingenuity. Shaji Kailas and writer A K Sajan are no greenhorns whose unthinking ways could be glossed over with an indulgent smile that says “boys, next time be more thoughtful.” They are veterans whose follies could embarrass those who hold them in a certain regard.
Shaji, though he always seemed to possess the philosophical depth of a local thug, is a kind of filmmaker who could give his frames an impressive technical polish. A K Sajan too has written some decent thrillers, the notable recent ones being ‘Chinthamani Kola case’ and ‘Nadiya Kollappetta Raathri.’ The reasoning used in ‘Drona’ to define the supernatural in earthly terms is murky; at the very least, unformed. It feels as if Shaji Kailas, while in the process of making ‘Drona’, developed a kind of multiplepersonality disorder which made one part of him blindly believe in the existence of spirits, another part repulse these very spirits using uncommon sense and yet another part in completely in awe of the superstar. The result was a film that looked thoroughly deranged, in a funny sort of way. But this is not to deny the flashes of brilliance that appear in the film, rarely than even the elusive ghost that at times passes as a blur along the background: the sudden top shot of a girl running into the woods seen at a distance; a moving shadow that falls on the people inside a haunted house; another top shot of the elements growing restless over a deserted market in the dead of the night. These shots are adequately eerie, very cinematic. But these add up to nothing; two or three lighted bulbs do not make a festival of lights.
‘Drona’ takes us to the climax through innumerable ‘false leads’. A false lead is used in crime stories to throw the viewer off scent, to keep his suspicion directed towards everyone else other than the real culprit, so that when the final revelation is made it comes as a knock-down surprise. A clever false lead will not look out of place on second viewing. If the viewer understood it differently while watching the sequence the first time it was because he was under the hypnotic spell of the filmmaker. Most of the ‘false leads’ in ‘Drona’ cannot be accounted for by any amount of logic.
Once the film is over, they look even more preposterous. The final showdown in ‘Drona’ brought to mind, for no particular reason but perhaps for the kind of stupor it had once induced, the infinitely stretched war sequence in Ramanand Saagar’s ‘Ramayana’ where arrows and all sorts of strange weapons keep flying and flying and flying and never meet.
r_ayyappan@expressbuzz.com