'Evil Eye' Review: EP Priyanka Chopra Jonas brings us a horror film more ridiculous than Indian soap operas
Spoilers for ‘Evil Eye’
For a horror film (be it supernatural or psychological), the story has to be engaging. The fear has to seep into the viewers, whether through overt gore or jumpscares or through more subtle and covert hints, filling you with dread for what is about to happen. ‘Evil Eye’, directed by Elan Dassani and Rajeev Dassani, and executive produced by, among others, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, does neither. Instead, it takes you down a mediocre path, full of hard-boiled clichés, and ends with a feeling of so much let-down, you feel like you deserve to be compensated for bearing with this.
The weird thing about ‘Evil Eye’ is that the story could have actually gone in a better direction. But we’ll get to that in a bit. The story follows Pallavi (Sunita Mani), an Indian woman in her late-twenties, fighting off her mother Usha’s (Sarita Choudhury) incessant attempts to get her married. One day, while waiting to meet one of these men her mother has arranged for her to meet (arranged marriages are as Indian as they get), Pallavi runs into a charming and good-looking man called Sandeep (Omar Maskati). The two hit it off, and things move fast, to the point where Pallavi tells her mother about him.
Initially, Usha is happy for her. But slowly, she begins to suspect that Sandeep is the reincarnation of an abusive, stalkerish ex-boyfriend she had, who one day, she accidentally killed during an abusive episode. Now, the film could have taken this opportunity to examine Usha’s paranoia, her rapidly declining mental health, and how this affects everyone in her vicinity, especially her daughter.
Unfortunately, the film decided that the best course of action here would be to have this very idea of an abusive ex-boyfriend reincarnating to be the daughter’s malicious boyfriend become its defining twist (if it can even be called a twist) and play it out too early for anything to even feel remotely unsettling. Sandeep, drumrolls, is evil and he intends to get back at Usha for his death by seducing and then punishing her daughter Pallavi. It is important to point out here that such a ludicrous notion is unfortunately rather prevalent in Indian popular culture. Films (to a certain degree), and largely soap operas introduce cockamamie like reincarnations and karmic revenge to plotlines to keep the story going. In Indian soap operas, it is not uncommon to witness snakes turning into people, curses, and rebirths.
And while it is mostly understandable (if not consumable) that mass-appeal soap operas would resort to cheap plot points like these to churn out episode after episode, it is somehow worse that this trope would appear in a Hollywood film that has been released under a genre horror project called ‘Welcome to Blumhouse’. And just like Indian soap operas, the story here is so unconvincing, it is almost laughable.
Also, for a film that has some good actors, no one seems to be doing a good job here. The exception, perhaps, is Choudhury, who managed to pull off a great role (in the first half) portraying an increasingly unstable Usha, whose paranoia and anxieties turn her into a recluse, who dives deep into superstitious hokum as her refuge. But once the “twist” is introduced, all that goes for a toss.
Also, if you’re Indian and are looking for representation in this film, you should look somewhere else. Bernard White’s (who plays Pallavi’s father Krishnan) “patanking” -- an exaggerated South Asian accent characterized by a retreating tongue, stressed syllables shaken out of order, mixed V’s and W’s, and hammered-out A’s -- is almost as unbearable as the fact that Krishnan and Usha’s modern-ish home in Delhi somehow has a Mughal-looking doorway. Yeah, we really needed to be reminded that they are Indians, didn’t we?
Ah well. It can’t be weirdly racist if it’s executive produced by an Indian star, can it?
‘Evil Eye’ is available for viewing on Amazon Prime Video.