No, you will not be watching your back as you tap-walk to your car in the parking lot. Not with this one. Phoonk is Ramu’s third horror film, after Raat and Bhoot. With this trilogy, he has ably confirmed that he is the only contemporary filmmaker with the abilities and desire to give some respectability to this much maligned genre in India cinema. For that, he deserves applause. Sadly, Phoonk is not the film for which the audience will give him an encore. It is unfortunately mis-directed, in every which way. When you are amidst peals of laughter even as the film takes one horrific turn after another, you know that there’s something gravely wrong here.

There is one major area that the film touches upon, and that would have given this film a greater dimension, if handled correctly. When they start to believe that their daughter is a victim of a supernatural phenomenon, Rajeev and his wife are forced to grapple with their faiths and beliefs. She questions her unflinching belief in God when He seems to be ignoring her in her time of need, and he is forced to face the possibility that there may be a God, because there is a Devil at work – he has no other explanation in the rational world for his daughter’s misery. Had Phoonk explored this underlying theme - faith versus logic, religion versus science - consistently throughout, it would have given the script much needed depth to overcome its other shortcomings.

The premise holds promise. Rajeev is a well-to-do construction business owner who is an atheist without reason. His is a happy family – a devout and loving wife, two beautiful children, and a deeply religious mother. It’s a wonderful life. In setting this up, we are also introduced to the supporting cast. Anshuman and Madhu are a couple employed by Rajeev, and who are like family to him, his lawyer, the maid and Rajeev’s driver. Then Rajeev discovers that Anshuman and Madhu are fleecing him, and he fires them from his company and his life. Slowly but surely, things starts coming apart after this. From an unfortunate death on his construction site to the mysterious disappearance of his daughter to the appearance of occult elements in his courtyard, Rajeev and his family encounter a series of inexplicable phenomena that take control of their conscience and their lives. The situation reaches a head when their daughter seems to be controlled by black magic, and Rajeev and his family desperately try to save her, even as they fight their own internal conflicts about blind faith and rationale.

After a reasonably well setup first half, the second half gets stuck in a mode it cannot get out of. Repeating shots and sequences fails to emphasize the horror the characters are going through, and that is the result of a weak and one-dimensional script. The screenplay by now becomes predictable and unfortunately, laughable. As we move to a climax that we already know, jarring sound effects, ominous toys, and the crow borrowed from The Omen are simply not enough to prop the thin storyline and keep it engaging in spite of the obvious. There are scattered moments that work. In what is actually a dream sequence, Rajeev is momentarily scared by his own reflection in a mirror in his house. Then as he looks away, we see the reflection in the mirror still looking on. It’s a marvelous scene, because being his dream Rajeev knows this happened – yet in the dream he cannot see it happening because he cannot see the mirror when he looks away. Or the one where the maid finds her usual photograph of Lord Hanuman missing, only to discover that it was turned over by the wind. The way this scene was built up is a sad indication of what Phoonk could have been.

The biggest problem is a classic script issue. Horror is so much about leaving the audience to imagine the bizarre possibilities - of hinting the unbelievable, of making them conclude the impossible. It is said that horror is in the mind, not in the eyes. This comes from a well crafted script, which Phoonk is not. Ramu has already given away to the audience that black magic is at work here, and who the culprits are. This is a huge problem, because the only hope of scaring the audience now is how he leads them to the, well, “revelation”. He does not have much to play with now, and a one-dimensional script with overdone camera work and sound effects are not enough to make this film work. The lack of complexity of the theme and the narrative ultimately results in the downfall of the film.

The performances vary from good to awful. Sudeep, the Kannada star making his Hindi film debut is excellent. His transition from the confident, a tad cocky, non-believer to the desperate, and shaken father who has to fight his beliefs to save his daughter is believable considerably because of his acting skills. His wife, played by Amruta Khanvilkar, is competently acted as well. But the unfortunate character of the grandmom is one huge ham show. This character actually represents the faith perspective in the film, but the perennially epileptic caricature is reduced to ridicule and involuntary laughter. Ashwini Kalsekar is loud as the black magic woman, but she does manage to strike a note of terror. Zakir Hussain plays a “tantrik”, that classic bollywood horror figure, and one of my favorite characters in horror films. He escapes any real evaluation due to an extremely reduced screen time, as do the rest of the characters in the film. Lillette Dubey does a good job of playing the doctor who cannot digest the supernatural and believes only in the science of her profession.

It has to be said that there is no other director in Bollywood who has taken B-grade out of horror movies like Ram Gopal Verma has. But Phoonk is not a scary film, and it almost makes you nostalgic for the Ramsay brand of kitschy horror. At least they entertained.