Movie Review: Alone

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By Shilpa Jamkhandikar

(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters)

Bhushan Patel ’s remake of Thai film “Alone” relies on the usual horror movie tricks to scare the audience, but the story is saddled with so many meaningless twists and turns that it’s more exhausting than scary toward the end.

Bipasha Basu plays conjoined twins Anjana and Sanjana. During an operation to separate them, one of them dies, while the other eventually gets married to the man of her dreams. But when her mother meets with a serious accident, she is forced to return to the house where she spent her childhood with her dead sister.

“Alone” is full of creaking doors, strange noises, lights going off mysteriously, and psychologists and exorcists who chant mantras and promise to get rid of the ghost. However, all this is so predictably done that even the most faint-hearted will yawn when the ghost finally makes an appearance.

The scary scenes are punctuated by Basu and co-star Karan Singh Grover gyrating to songs, cuddling puppies and straddling each other on a raft on the backwaters of Kerala. Their fights about their lacklustre marriage and the husband’s workaholic nature are introduced almost as an afterthought and don’t sound credible, especially when they come immediately after a romantic song.

To its credit, “Alone” isn’t a campy horror film, but there just isn’t enough in it to raise the movie above the run-of-the-mill scary flick. Basu is getting better at playing the horror film heroine, pulling off the role of both the victim and the ghost with equal panache. However, debutant Grover is too busy flexing his muscles to concentrate on that little thing called acting.

“Alone” is just another in a long line of Bollywood horror films that think all it takes to scare audiences is creaking sounds and deserted houses.

(Editing by David Lalmalsawma; Follow Shilpa on Twitter @shilpajay and David @davidlms25 | This article is website-exclusive and cannot be reproduced without permission)

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