Maa Review: Kajol Show All The Way But Film Falls Flat

Fronted solidly by Kajol in the guise of a woman who fights fiercely to prevent her daughter from falling prey to an old curse that hangs over the family and their village, Maa is a confused concoction. Faith, fear and feudalism flow into a feminine fable both fantastical and feeble.  

The mythological drama pans out in a remote Bengal village – its name is a Punjabified ‘Chandarpur' and not ‘Chandrapur' as it would be pronounced and spelled by a Bengali – off a forest that nobody dares to enter. Here, newly-pubescent girls disappear only to return within days without any recollection of what happened to them and where they went. 

That is pretty much the fate of Maa, helmed by Vishal Furia, whose fame rests on the 2016 Marathi horror flick Lapachhapi (remade in Hindi as Chhori by the director himself). It is way too erratic to be aware where it is going.  

Maa forgets what it wants to be – a straight up horror movie or a mish-mash of many things ranging from a good-versus-evil tale to a celebration of a benign, doting mother's power to be destructive when her child is threatened by a force she can barely comprehend. 

Forty years ago, twins, a male and a female, are born in an aristocratic home on the night of Kali Puja. The birth of the boy is greeted with joy all around. The girl is taken away and done to death under a massive banyan tree that is destined to become a key ‘character' in the story and spread its tentacles way beyond the jungle.  

The killing of the girl unleashes a curse that casts a shadow on all young village girls on the cusp of adulthood. They are hounded by a daitya (demon), a personification of a fearsome giant tree that spreads terror around the zamindar's mansion that is now up for sale.  

The zamindar's son, Shuvankar (Indraneil Sengupta) – yes, the boy who is allowed to live and branch out – leaves home never to return. He hides his family's dark secret from his daughter Shweta (Kherin Sharma).   

Maa has more than its share of jump scares, especially in the first half, where dread and foreboding stalk Shuvankar and his wife Ambika (Kajol). The husband visits the village after a long absence when he receives news of his father's demise.  

He expresses a desire to sell the rajbari (manor). But he meets a grisly end before that comes to pass. The village headman Joydev (Ronit Roy) takes upon himself the responsibility of fulfilling the departed man's last wish. He locates a broker interested in the property and requests Ambika to come over and finalise the deal in person. 

Ambika and her daughter travel to Chandarpur. Before they can settle in and get a hang of the place, the duo runs into a chain of events that sends shockwaves through the mansion and befuddles the mother who knows just enough to be mindful of the dangers that lurk beyond the crumbling back façade of the manor.   

Religion and mythology play a key role in Maa. A Kali temple overlooks the courtyard of the mansion. We learn that the sanctum sanctorum has been shuttered for four decades. The longtime family factotum Bikash (Gopal Singh) informs Ambika that the shrine can be thrown only when somebody has a vision of the deity and earns the right to conduct Kali Puja rituals. 

While Bikash receives Ambika and Shweta with warmth and enthusiasm and his daughter Dipika (Roopkatha Chakraborty) quickly bonds with the city girl, his wife Nandini (Surjyasikha Das) views the inheritors of the property with suspicion. It becomes clear soon enough why she feels the way she does.  

Unlike many recent Hindi films of the genre, Furia's supernatural drama does not play horror for laughs. It cannot, however, prevent itself from straying into laughable terrain more often than is good for it. Maa is just too weird to be the patriarchy-busting fantasy that it aims to be.    

When the feudal seeks to suppress the feminine in a battle waged on the boundaries of superstition that often sinks into mumbo-jumbo, the film has a tough time holding its flights of excessive fancy together.        

The visual palette of the Saiwyn Quadras-scripted film is undeniably fascinating. The VFX, too, does its bit to spook the audience. Dimly lit interiors, discoloured walls and apparitions that watch from the shadows combine to create a few of the film's more chilling moments.  But once the human and the divine begin to overlap and the fight between darkness and sanity assumes literal dimensions, the film falls flat. 

Maa, co-produced by Devgn Films, is a Kajol show all the way. But no matter what she brings to the table, consistency eludes the film as a result of a screenplay that could have done with more coherence. Ronit Roy has a meaty role that he does justice to. Kherin Sharma and Roopkatha Chakraborty, the two young actresses cast as girls tormented by the devil, are impressive. 

The themes that Maa tackles are untethered to the here and now, but it isn't the sort of mythological gender war drama that it aspires to be. It is way too unhinged to be earth-shatteringly terrifying. It flies in multiple directions and never finds a steady orbit. Only for Kajol fans.