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Review of Munjya: While the titular beast is the main attraction, Abhay Verma's portrayal of the young man fighting for his sanity keeps him from taking centre stage. Suhas Joshi, Sharvari Wagh, and Mona Singh are all more than suitable in a movie where they don't really get much attention.
Munjya is a horror comedy that brings pop culture excess and Konkani legend together, often inadvertently bringing out the eerie side. It is clumsy and confused, requiring the voluntary suspension of disbelief but failing to achieve it.
Directed by Aditya Sarpotdar and written by Niren Bhatt, the Maddock Films movie is the fourth in the banner's slate of spooky films, following Roohi, Bhediya, and Stree. The story was devised by Yogesh Chandekar. It is probably only slightly better than Roohi and nowhere near as good as Stree and Bhediya.
Beyond the terror aspect that feeds the genre, Stree and Bhediya tackled subjects that were far more profound. Whereas the latter utilised the metaphor of a beast on the prowl to promote environmental protection, the former exploited the occult to highlight female empowerment. Does Munjya accomplish anything more than combine a lighthearted sense of humour with a fear of the dark? Not exactly.
Munjya tells us, at best, that fear overcomes us because we shrink away from it. Someone advises Bittu (Abhay Verma), a young guy who works in his mother's beauty parlour and longs to be free of his apron ties, "Face it and resist it and victory will be yours."
Munjya feels much longer than its two hours because, often, the difficult-to-digest twaddle gives way to the mumbo-jumbo that it thrusts onto us. It revolves around a fight between a child who can't understand his nightmares and a monster from the underworld. Many believe he is high. He finds it difficult to deny them the suspicion.
The overly protective Bittu's mother, Pammi (Mona Singh), cringes at the thought of the young man leaving the nest to pursue his own path and find better opportunities. He must deal with more than just his mother, though. Munjya, the child-demon, is more cunning than malevolent and follows Bittu with great determination.
Thirty years ago, in a quaint and beautiful Konkan village by the sea, a young man falls in love with an older female and passes just a few days after his mundan. His unfulfilled passion transforms him into a lovelorn ghoul that looks for human sacrifice as compensation—a ritual he was unable to perform while still a living, breathing kid.
Munjya searches for Munni, the girl he loved but lost, following Bittu from the forest all the way to Pune. Bittu's boyhood buddy Bela (Sharvari Wagh), who is older than him but still the subject of repressed love, unintentionally falls victim to a transaction that puts her life in jeopardy.
The CGI creature, an impish, Gremlin-like creature that prances around at random, lacks a terrifying effect on the viewer, and the visual effects are primitive. Only Bittu can see Munjya, who won't let the boy go until his wishes are fulfilled. That portends problems for the movie as well as Bittu. Both the beast and the movie alternate between different forms. Munjya never really understands
An air of mystery and unease is created by the use of thunder, lightning, sea waves, menacing shadows in the forest, and a tree with a tentacled trunk. However, Munjya never succeeds in seducing the audience to believe the ludicrous and erroneous story it tells.
Fear, alarm, or empathy are not evoked by the sly CGI creature or the youngster he torments. Yes, there is an attempt to make Bittu appear like a miniature version of Harry Potter; after all, he is a man who needs to look within himself to uncover the magic that will enable him to defeat Munjya.
No matter how many falls he has, Bittu never loses his spectacles. He wears his spectacles while he sleeps. We definitely want him to get out of his current situation, but his Sikh friend and confidant Diljit Singh Dhillon, a videographer with aspirations to become a director, is far more fascinating than the stressed-out child.
Elvis Karim Prabhakar, a charlatan, enters the scene late in the movie and claims to have the "hand of god" to drive out ghosts. Bittu and his friend witness him hawk his miracle. They ask for his assistance in fending off Munjya. The conflict returns to the forest where it all started. It's free for all after that.
Munjya is rarely creepy enough to elicit jump scares, despite being expertly filmed by cinematographer Saurabh Goswami. Everything seems so unrealistic that an animated movie would have made a lot better movie. Live action tends to over-literalize everything, thus undermining the concept's underlying interest. The writers and the director would have had more creative freedom to take the imaginative turns that this folk legend-inspired drama required if it had been animated.
Munjya is the kind of movie that you want to be gone from your life just as much as Bittu does! It's over before it even reaches the halfway point. It is evident that a lot of work has gone into creating it. It barely produces anything comparable.
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