Bhoot: Part One – The Haunted Ship Movie Review: Script Analysis
Bhanu Pratap Singh gets really confused in balancing the script for masses as well classes. You’ve your hallucination angle which is left unexplored, cut to Vicky Kaushal jumping chains like a Tarzan over chains which is not something you expect from the initial built-up.
The ship, which could have been the central protagonist, is never really used for the chills. Remove ship and put a house, you’ll get your usual horror flick that’s been done to death. There are chills but they come at a cost of the absence of solid thrills. Pushkar Singh’s screenplay doesn’t delve well with the sound design because the score takes you to the horror scenes making them pretty predictable. What this one needed were good sudden scares to hold your intrigue.
Bhoot: Part One – The Haunted Ship Movie Review: Star Performance
Vicky Kaushal maintains subtlety throughout amidst a chaotic mess of a story. He’s believable and more importantly holds the reigns of the narration at places, avoiding it from deviating in a wrong way. But the oh-I-am-scary script affects his presence at times when there are zero scares.
Playing Vicky’s friend, Akash Dhar adds no value despite a decent amount of screen-space. Gets a very lazily written character to act anything. It’s an opportunity missed of adding a good friendship angle to the scenario. Bhumi Pednekar plays a just-for-the-sake-of-it cameo. Ashutosh Rana gets a character who’s straight out of his 90s horror movies making no sense whatsoever.
Bhoot: Part One – The Haunted Ship Movie Review: Direction, Music
Bhanu Pratap Singh, without a doubt, manages to create the right atmospheric for a film like this but it’s what he does there lacks soul (literally!). He builds the jump-scares in the first half but fails to carry forward them in the second half because of cluttered story-building. First half sails smooth, while second drowns deep.
Ketan Sodha manages to hold your attention with his background score in majoring of the portions in the first half. But then the score just follows what every unscary horror movie does, goes loud for no reason. Thankfully there’s a single song in the film, Akhil Sachdeva’s Channa Ve which fits in well and is melodious.
Bhoot: Part One – The Haunted Ship Movie Review: The Last Word
All said and done, Bhoot: Part One – The Haunted Ship is somewhere between a ‘Halloween’ & ‘Amavas’ and it just can’t ‘creep it real’. The genre lovers might find some moments to hold on but that’s about it.
