Movie Review - Psyche Drama ‘Chhorii’ Plays With Your Mind, Boasts Of Nushrratt Bharuccha’s Career Best Performance

Nushrratt has been seen as a mischievous young woman in practically each of her hits so far and here she gets into a rather serious avtar where she has to play a lot with the silences.

By Joginder Tuteja

Now this is what you call as a true ‘mood film’. There aren’t any horror faces staring down at you from a window. No ‘bhatakti aatma’ jumping from the ceiling. No ugly spirits entering your body. Instead, it’s the haunting scenes at work where sugarcane fields can look ominous and three innocent looking kids can create mayhem. Why just does, even a ‘chandamama’ tale of a crow and a sparrow can send shivers down your spine. That’s the kind of mood that director Vishal Furia manages to create in this two hour plus movie that takes its time to settle in and then unleashes something that is beyond your imagination.

Yes, the movie could well have been a 100 minutes affair and still made a similar impression. Frankly, not much happens in the first 30 minutes. Once Nushrratt and her husband (Saurabh Goyal) decide to step into an isolated village to escape moneylenders, you know that there isn’t something right at the household, courtesy Mita Vashisht playing a Rajasthani woman who has secrets of her own. Still, even though the point has been made, it takes a lot of screen time to keep the prevailing mood on even though as a viewer you tend to get a bit impatient for the crux of the plot to arrive.

This is the reason why even when the moment of reckoning indeed arrives around the interval point, the impact is not as hammer strong as one would have expected since a lot of time is taken to reach here. Nonetheless, what matters is that the drama is still interesting and hence you look forward to what really happens from this point on for the next 50 odd minutes.

This is where one has to give credit to Vishal and creative team at Vikram Malhotra’s Abundantia Entertainment who ensure that technically the film is quite proficient. It’s not an easy task to set an entire movie at an isolated house in the midst of sugarcane fields and still lend it a classy look and feel. However that happens with just the apt cinematography, lighting, sound design, background score and authentic sets. Frankly, if not for all of this, Chhorii wouldn’t have managed to get into the ‘psyche mood’ thay it aspires for.

One also had to credit Nushrratt Bharuccha and Mita Vashisht who plays the two principle characters. Nushrratt has been seen as a mischievous young woman in practically each of her hits so far and here she gets into a rather serious avtar where she has to play a lot with the silences. There are no naughty dialogues to be mouthed and this one is not into song and dance routine either. Still, just the way she gazes into emptiness is what makes her stand out. As for Mita Vashisht then well, this is turning out to be a season of lingos and accent for her. If in the web series Your Honour 2 she is playing a Sikh cop, here she is a Rajasthani villager and yet again she impresses with her hold over the medium. Saurabh Goyal is decent while Rajesh Jais is adequate as the family’s driver who has a past of his own.

Past is what Chhorii delves in which is unlike a usual horror film and instead plays with the mind of a viewer. Of course it doesn’t make for a comfortable watch but if you are the kind who like to have their fair share of scares at regular intervals then this one does its job well.

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