Rahul Desai
The title, not unlike the 1944 Ingrid Bergman-starring thriller of the same name, explains much of the film’s genre identity. A young and traumatised woman believes she is being manipulated by others. She is convinced that her shaky mental state is being exploited.
The movie spends a little too long on the suspense-building at night, but it’s also a clever way of implying that horror film-making is essentially a language of gaslighting the audience. The tools it uses – jump scares, sound cues, visual effects, silences, eerie atmospherics – are mostly red herrings to manipulate viewers away from the truth.
Given director’s Pavan Kirpalani’s credentials – his Phobia (2016) is possibly the best of its kind in the last decade of Hindi cinema – the subversion is fitting. Even the setting makes sense.
But the hard truth is that Gaslight works better in theory. The lazy way to put it would be: The ideas are there and the execution is not. As a movie, as a viewing experience, it isn’t all that smooth. The deeper problem with Gaslight, though, is that it falls prey to its own genre trappings – it is derailed by its own paranoia of being too simple and visible.
By second-guessing (or, well, gaslighting) itself this way, the story ends up sabotaging its own sense of reasoning and logic. It casts aspersions over the performances and the performances within performances, too, which until then were adequate enough. Suddenly, you wonder why Sara Ali Khan played Meesha a certain way
In short, it feels like Gaslight becomes a victim of its own title. The final revelation gets clunky in its pursuit to keep us confused about whether the film is super-naturally or naturally inclined. It made me sad, really, because for a while it was a rare film that read uncertainty as a function of fear.