Editor of a couple of Tamil films and a Hindi film, Kamal debuts as writer-director-producer with the horror suspense thriller Yoogan.
It has all the cliché of a routine supernatural thriller. And it takes its horror-quotient quite seriously, not adulterating it with any dark humour. But the treatment is amateurish at times, the fear-factor missing.
It centres on a group of friends who work in an IT company, and the turn their lives take when a past action comes home to roost. As one death after another happens under mysterious circumstances, the friends get a MMS with the picture of the next victim. The first half is quite a boring affair, the scenes seeming like they were being repeated.
All the elements one can expect from a supernatural flick are here too - like creaking doors, dim lit interiors, strange sounds, mirror-shots of the ghostly presence of a white clothed woman with long hair covering half her face, etc. But there is not one moment that really jolts you out of your senses.
The couple of deaths bring in the police, who believe that one in the group could be the culprit. Investigating cop Shakti (Tarun) traces the message to a mobile once owned by Pooja who had committed suicide a year back. She had been the project manager in the company the friends were working in.
It’s in the second half that the narration gathers a little momentum. As Shakti questions each of the guys, including Vinay, Pooja’s lover, the pieces of the puzzle fall in place. Each has a back story to tell, but nothing very exciting. With three of the four friends dead, the film is how the cops try to protect the next victim. There is not much impact the actors can create with their performances in this type of a scenario. The director brings in a twist in the end trying to balance the supernatural with the human factor, but it only confuses.
Yoogan at best is a mild thriller, more of a stepping stone for the debutant maker.