Chhorii 2 Is A Painfully Literal Take On Feminism

IF THERE IS A PERFECT AUDIENCE for a horror film, I’d like to believe it is me. This is not false bravado but an honest confession. Bring in someone with green eyes, throw in a jump scare, pull someone from under the bed, and you will see me scream my lungs out. I am always scared and always jumpy. I am the reason that other people, those not scared in the least, are rattled because I make my fear everyone’s business. And yet, Vishal Furia’s Chhorii 2, Vishal Furia’s sequel to his 2021 film, left me disinterested, unscared and, worse, bored.

In the last couple of years, there has been a resurgence of the horror genre, except that the effect is softened by comedy. Horror comedy, the consequent hybrid result, has in turn evolved into a commercial goldmine. The context is important because Furia does not give in despite obvious temptations. He remains admirably focused and crafts Chhorii 2 in the same world as Chhorii. Except even the latter, a remake of his 2017 Marathi film Lapachhapi, was not effective to begin with.

But even with minimal expectations, his new film is surprisingly dull and literalises every argument in gender studies. The common phrase of women being tied by the shackles of patriarchy translates to women being shackled by patriarchs in the film. There are more instances: the idea of women being the gatekeepers of patriarchy is rendered as a woman being the gatekeeper of an old patriarch. Motherhood, often considered a superpower, is expressed as a mother suddenly garnering superhuman physical strength to save her daughter. The messaging in Chhorii 2 is so on the nose that everything — context and subtext — is distilled to text.

Seven years after Sakshi (Nushrratt Bharuccha) ran away with her child from her orthodox in-laws and husband, all of whom wanted a son at any cost and were willing to kill the unborn child, she returns to the same village to save her daughter. The premise shifts but not quite. The first film ended with Sakshi killing them and later being helped by a police officer (an earnest Gashmeer Mahajani). The second part begins with another tale of onslaught and maternal perseverance and protection. Female infanticide gives way to child marriage.

Written by Ajit Jagtap and Furia, Chhorii 2 takes this premise and decides to move in circles with it. Keeping with the tendency of the film, I also mean this literally. Furia spends all of ten minutes in world building, which basically includes reiterating time and again that the daughter, Ishani is allergic to the sun (and that she is darkness personified). She is soon kidnapped by the sarpanch of her father’s village and in minutes, the plot weakens to the effect of a wet tissue paper.

For some inexplicable reason, Furia spends more than half of the film’s runtime in the maze of a tunnel where both Sakshi and Ishani are held. The idea of how complicated the labyrinth is gets conveyed soon, but the filmmaker keeps going on, making the two characters run through the concrete web. The build-up goes on forever and leads to no concrete resolution. Furia even shoots them with little invention, using the geography of the space to little effect.

Details spill out sluggishly. There is someone called a daasi ma (a fine Soha Ali Khan wasted in a role that is only always too verbatim) who guards the door of their ancestor, a prehistoric man who draws vitality from younger women. To protect their tribe, Ishani needs to be sacrificed to him. Chhorii 2 arrives at this after 20 rounds of the maze and spends half a second to depict the change of heart in characters who were, hitherto, neck deep conditioned in patriarchy.

It is lazy for a bad film to be well-intentioned, and it is equally lazy to commend a bad film for having good intentions. Chhorii 2 is so obvious in its badness that it makes dismissing it a lesser problem. The bigger issue here is the promise of a third part, and Bharuccha, painfully grating in her turn, reprising the role. Women deserve better, but my closing argument is that someone like me, who would scream at a spoon if it moved too fast on screen, deserves better. Chhorii 2 is not it.

Chhorii 2 is currently streaming on Prime Video.