Bhediya Review: Rarely Has A Film Rationalized The Beauty Of Its Male Body With Such Horny Logic

Director: Amar Kaushik

Writer: Niren Bhatt

Cast: Varun Dhawan, Kriti Sanon, Deepak Dobriyal, Abhishek Banerjee, Paalin Kabak

Let me begin with a riddle. What looks fearsome, fibrous, and rough at first sight, but is, at its core, a soft, tender little thing?

You must be thinking — a coconut, surely. But also, an Amar Kaushik ghost. The director of Stree and now Bhediya has made something of a celebratory stain in the horror-comedy genre. His titular ghosts arrive with the droning music of doom, but leave having performed public service announcements. His main protagonists, Rajkummar Rao as a gifted tailor in Stree and Varun Dhawan as a suited-booted corporate stooge here, take the journey from being afraid of the ghosts to finding common ground with them. If you want to stretch this riddle a little, you can take Amar Kaushik’s second film Bala, where febrile, balding masculinity is that grisly ghost which ultimately just finds itself wanting a hug.

The point being Amar Kaushik’s ghosts are not really ghosts. They themselves are haunted, desiring some form of affection. In Bhediya the titular werewolf, the icchadhari bhediya, is haunting the mountains of Ziro. Varun Dhawan plays Bhaskar, the MNC-wala who is shipped to Arunachal Pradesh to convince the locals to build a road through the forest. Even Dhawan’s charm cannot convince you that development is good, because the script, written by Niren Bhatt, keeps you at a distance from his character. It wants you to not buy into his arguments for development in the North-East. It wants you to find them silly, even gauche. It is here that Dhawan’s limitations as an actor emerge. He doesn't know what to do when he is not supposed to be charming.

One night, after peeing in the bushes, he gets bit in the butt by a werewolf. As the logic goes, you are what you are eaten by, and Bhaskar becomes a werewolf, too. The gifted, show-stealing Abhishek Banerjee plays his IAS aspiring cousin who bunches with him into “the North-East” and Paalin Kabak tags along as Bhaskar’s “local friend”. Together, this allows for what Amar Kaushik sketches best, bumbling male friendship. It does not have that three-way bite of Stree because there, all three seemed to be on equal footing — just as willing to being the butt of a joke as they are the butt of a gun stabbing someone in the face. You can see how in the travel song in Bhediya, ‘Baaki Sab Theek’, the reach is exceeding the grasp, and that charm is what they are after, even if it isn’t what they ultimately get.

The women are best left unaccounted for there Kriti Sanon who plays a vet, and is mysterious for sly, but honestly, quite silly, narrative reasons. You wonder why no one in the film asks who she is and where she comes from. Not even Bhaskar, who seems smitten. Is this because it’s all men? The film allows for love between them in the most lazy, fatiguing, commercially safe manner. She takes him to a place that is close to her heart. It is a CGI cliff, bursting with neon flowers. In a world like Arunachal Pradesh prized for its natural beauty, the audacity for visual effects? All desire then is, instead, located in our relationship with the body of Bhaskar, or well, Varun Dhawan.

Rarely has a film rationalized the beauty of its male body with such salivating, tongue wagging, horny logic. Bhaskar, overnight, inherits the body of sculpted granite from being bitten by the werewolf. Looking at the mirror, he marvels as we do. He is as thankful as we are. In one of the most rippling and tumultuous scenes, right before we cut to interval, in a long shot we see Bhaskar becoming the werewolf, the camera leering, his shirt being ripped apart, his bones reorienting, his spine rejecting evolution to slouch on all fours, the bush of hair, the tail tearing forth from the posterior fabric of his boxers. The body is paid such careful attention, it is as though we have come for a collective randy pilgrimage. In another scene, there is a literal snake in Bhaskar’s pants — and I have to say literal because there is enough evidence of metaphoric snakes throbbing conspicuously inside gray sweatpants and boxers throughout the film. As the snake, the literal snake, meanders her way up his body, the camera is looking down from over Dhawan’s shoulder, making clear the gap between the boxer and his skin, almost inviting us, seated silly in 3D glasses to shift a little and peer in, as though looking over a balcony. Imagine a film that requires, by logic, its male protagonist to walk around the city naked, barely clothed, or at other times tied by chains in his own home as he tires away, shirtless?

The problem is, this film cannot fuel its engine solely from desire, because for better or worse — worse, I think — this isn’t that kind of film. It needs that thing which makes a story worth holding onto, sailing along — a yearning to know what happens next, an investment in the lives unfolding. The problem as I see it, with the horror-comedy genre, with the Amar Kaushik genre, is that the comedy always undercuts the horror, hollowing it of its clawing thrum. The tensile quality of the horror genre is wondering which life is at stake, if mortality will ever be confronted. When people die in Bhediya, or disappear in Stree for that matter, it never feels like they do, because the comedy of the film saps any value their life has. By design, by tone, nothing feels at stake. Besides, the humor in these films isn’t rip-roaring or dark as much as smart and oiled with puns. These films, then, have this listless quality, of a story that just coasts along until that one big twist. Instead, there is a loud, performative heart, one that is passionate about issues. Issues.

Not one but two there are in Bhediya — the North-East being given the side-glance by the mainland Indians and also corporate development being fermented at the cost of forests being felled. Much like it was ironic that a film titled Stree had the most limply written women, here, too, North-Eastern representation being the moral peg, does little for the North-Eastern characters in it. They seem like pin-ups to be pitted against one another. Issues are solved as feebly as they are brought up, not because this is a commercial film and must end happily, but because the issues are so shallow in their conception, so hollow in their treatment, so narrow in their scope, all they need to be validated is a change of heart from Bhaskar. Our man Bhaskar, who needed to be bitten in his bum, transformed into an animal, fall in love with a mysterious vet with dense bangs, and have that snake in his pants stare him in the face, to realize — hey, cutting trees is not cool.