Nayyi Navelli Review: Yami Gautam Film Is Neither Funny Nor On Point With The Supernatural

Desperate as hell to look and sound like a film that is serving up a fresh-off-the-oven concoction, Nayyi Navelli, scripted by Divy Nidhi Sharma from a story by Himanshu Sharma, goes overboard with a palette of garish colours and a cast of actors of proven quality bent upon out-hamming each other.  

The result is a film that neither looks pretty nor sounds right. Talk overshadows action and logic gets drowned out in the confusing din of clashing decibel levels. 

Director Balaji Mohan ropes in G.V. Prakash Kumar to provide the background score as well as compose the songs, but nothing really contributes to livening up the film enough to help it rise above the cacophony and become music to the ears.       

But then there is Yami Gautam Dhar leading the ensemble and striving to inject glamour and flounce into the goings-on. Anurag Thakur goes yakety-yak without let. It is tiresome and annoying for no fault of the actor. The writing is the culprit - it yields a lot of sound and fury but makes little sense.   

Before it all gets underway, the film offers a long disclaimer that calls upon the audience to exercise discretion in dealing with what is being presented on the screen. That is as much an admission of the film's failings as an appeal to the viewer to be lenient with its judgment of the fare on show.  

Nayyi Navelli, an Amazon MGM Studios and Colour Yellow Productions film, claims (in the aforementioned disclaimer) to be inspired by the Ramayana. But it is hardly ever confident of persuading the audience to believe the claim that in its depiction of the triumph of good over evil, the importance of familial duty and a protagonist who triumphs over all odds it driven by an 'epic' vision.  

Set in Meerut, the script centres on Mohini, who is the India head of an MNC. Her entry scene ends with a massive chandelier falling on and killing an obnoxious corporate executive. In the pool of blood, a romance blooms. The courtship leads to the lady marrying a colleague, Raja Awasthi (Addinath M. Kothare), a victim of the slain boss. Her entry into the Awasthi household sets the cat among the pigeons.  

The cat here represents exploited, unseen and unthanked women now on the verge of settling scores with the world - thanks to Mohini's powers -- and the pigeons denote society (and families) as a whole. The predators are on the back foot in the film, but the commentary about the attack on social ills goes haywire.      

In one sequence, Mohini shames Raja's father (Sunil Sinha) into expressing gratitude to his wife, Asha (Sunita Rajwar), for making tens of cups of tea for the brood gathered to finalise the heroine's engagement with Raja.   

The Awasthi family runs scared when Raja's brother Bantu (Anurag Thakur), a garrulous young man repeatedly accused of being a ganja addict, reveals that the latter's wife is a daayan, a woman from another world with powers to cause grave harm to everybody around her. 

Nayyi Navelli is one of those hard-to-fathom horror comedies that Bollywood has been foisting upon us with great regularity of late. It is neither funny nor on point with its treatment of the supernatural.  

One character, a Pinky Bua (Mita Vashisht), weds an Indian Administrative Service officer (Aaditya Kulshreshth) who, through kohl-lined eyes, sees his bride as somebody she isn't and waxes eloquent about her beauty. That is the level of comedy that the film proffers.  

Projecting itself as something resembling a feminist film, Nayyi Navelli picks a not-so-young woman to turn into a butt of ridicule. It uses the women's empowerment theme to deliver a fantasy that is not only ludicrously daft but also oftentimes hurtful. 

It is all meant to be fun and games. It really isn't. It isn't because of the string of cringeworthy twists that are aimed at strengthening Bantu's suspicion that his sister-in-law is a threat to the family. 

If one were to set aside one's reservations about the half-baked ideas it floats on its way to explaining what is going on in the mysterious world that Mohini lives in and draws strength from, would Nayyi Navelli be at least an entertaining film worth the price of a multiplex ticket?  

Not unless you believe that the intervention of a daayan is the answer to the workaday miseries that are heaped upon women. That is the problem with the film: its flights of fancy are so stretched that they never quite stick the landing.