Stree (2018)

Warning: I am going to spoil a bit of the film’s backstory!

The town of Chanderi in Bhopal is cursed. Once a year, during a local(?) festival, a female spirit the town’s inhabitants only refer to as “Stree” – The Woman – roams the streets at night attacking and abducting young men who are out and about on their own, leaving behind nothing but their clothes. At least there’s an easy way to keep one’s home safe from ghostly visits. One simply has to write “O Woman, come tomorrow” on the wall of one’s house, and the apparently very polite ghost isn’t going to bother one. So it should be easy enough keeping the town’s young men safe for four nights a year, but as it goes, the ghost does find rather a lot of victims.

It certainly doesn’t help that there are notorious sceptics like young tailor savant Vicky (Rajkummar Rao) around. Vicky doesn’t believe in the ghost at all. Though, to be fair to the guy, he is rather more involved with romancing a mysterious, apparently nameless woman (Shraddha Kapoor), who does ask increasingly curious things of him. So curious, in fact, that his two bosom buddies Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) and Jaana (Abhishek Banerjee) begin to suspect their friend’s beloved might be The Woman herself.

Horror comedies are a problematic proposition on the best of days, and I often have problems with the humour in Hindi movies (that’s not necessarily the humour’s fault, mind you, but rather mine), so I was very pleasantly surprised by Amar Kaushik’s Stree. As a horror comedy, Stree avoids all of the main mistakes bad entries into the genre tend to make, so the film does not use its supernatural menace for any slapstick business, having a bit of fun with the folklore surrounding her but always keeping her as an actual menace when she appears. Thanks to that, there are actual stakes for the protagonists.

I also found myself rather liking the particular version of the romantic fool the film presents, the film never overdoing it with the romantic part of the character nor the foolishness. Vicky’s a sweet idiot, and it’s certainly no surprise that he’d fall for our mysterious nameless woman. Pleasantly enough, once we get to know her a little, the good lady does turn out not to be just mysterious (the kind of mystery a sequel will probably solve) but also mildly bad-ass, and not the least bit of a damsel.

And, you know, a lot of the jokes here may not be terribly deep, but they are funny, usually character and situation based (subtitles don’t really do wordplay), and are well-timed. Which parallels the spooky bits of the film, none of whom will actually frighten anyone (I very much hope) but that do feel pleasantly spooky. The film’s worst part are the small handful of musical numbers, curiously enough for a Bollywood movie, which lack in charm and visual imagination despite Kaushik demonstrating he’s quite capable of showing both quite a bit otherwise.

All this alone would make for a pleasant horror comedy, but there’s also a mildly subversive subtext involved that adds some spice to the proceedings. The ghost, you see, belongs to a prostitute (about as low on the Indian class ladder as you can get) who is rightfully angry for an historical evil committed against her and her one true love, so our heroes do in the end not destroy her, but take away her power to do evil, while acknowledging the evil committed towards her. They make amends for the sins of the past, and turn the thing that haunted their town into its supernatural protector in the end. And wouldn’t you know it, the prophesied chosen one to bring this sort of thing about must – among other things – be the son of a prostitute himself, which is not at all the sort of thing you’d expect in a Hindi mainstream movie like this (and would be hard pressed to find in any mainstream western movies, when it comes to that). But then, Stree also tends to be rather playful when it comes to gender roles, not doing any deep deconstructions but clearly approaching the whole “man” and “woman” thing and their roles in a genre movie with a degree of freedom, so it has form with this sort of thing.


All of which adds a further very likeable dimension to a film I found pretty likeable already, turning Stree into a more than pleasant horror comedy.