1921 (2018)

Surprisingly enough, It’s 1921. Young aspiring musician (or kitsch pianist, given some of the stuff he is mimicking to play) Ayush (Karan Kundra) has hit the jackpot: a rich Hindu gentleman is not only sponsoring his studies at the world-renowned music school of York, England but has also given him the run of his usually empty mansion there, as long as he’s watering the plants. But Ayush’s happiness is short-lived, for he is terrorized by a variety of supernatural occurrences that climax in an ugly black spot growing ever larger on his body.

Fortunately, destiny (as a matter of fact, Destiny with a capital D, it’s that sort of a movie), leads him to another student at the University of York, Rose (Zarine Khan). Rose is a typical movie or TV ghost seer, always helping out the dead people she sees so they can find rest, her own social life be damned. However, Rose is usually working with ghosts that want to be laid to rest, whereas Ayush’s problem really rather seems to ask for a big damn exorcism. Of course, Rose and Ayush fall in huge romantic love during the process of finding out what kind of spookery he suffers from, but will that be enough to solve some really rather intense ghost troubles?

For my tastes, Vikram Bhatt’s 1921 is the weakest in the not terribly connected series of horror movies about the misadventures of various pretty young Hindus in an absurd, yet also very pretty and atmospheric version of fantasy England in the early 1920s, a pleasant place full of ghosts but with only the tiniest smidgen of racism and colonialist spirit. This fantasy England is one of the elements of the 192x films I particularly enjoy. There’s nothing not to like about the film industry from a former colony making up a version of their old colonizer's home just as absurd as that of India you’ll find in many British films, turning England exotic. This approach is historically fair, usually lush to look at and just much more interesting than another attempt at realism.

Now, in 1921, Bhatt doesn’t do this romantic bizarro version of England populated by a couple of professional Hindi actors and actresses and two handful of absolutely terrible English language ones (how do films, wherever they are made, always find the least competent actors working in another language?) as much justice as the other films in the series do. The film is just not reaching the heights of Indian/British Gothic of particularly 1920: London, and weakening many a scene of horror by a tendency to overlight everything for no good reason whatsoever, banning shadows from a movie that really should contain a lot of them. While Khan makes a fine romantic heroine, I found Kundra a bit too one-note, using one puzzled facial expression for every emotion his character is supposed to feel. Even when he is possessed by a ghost, his non-expression doesn’t really change all that much.

The film’s plot isn’t exactly tight, with so many plot twists and flashbacks it borders on the absurd. Not all of them are terribly effective or necessary, either, the film seemingly taking a quantity over quality approach here. However, one central twist not atypical for films about seers of dead people is handled effectively, leading into a finale that is as crazy as one could wish for, with a couple of scenes of horror that may be staged in much too chipper a tone to frighten anyone but which are also so plain fun in conception and execution nobody with a sense of silly joy in their heart will ever complain about their flaws.

The horror scenes are generally neither frightening nor disturbing, yet they are – just as the film’s plot twist mania – enthusiastically realized and in the spirit of good fun. Particular favourites are the random (or is it?) poisoning by femme fatale, the ghostly inn full of bad gore CGI, and of course the axe business in the finale, a moment you, as they say, gotta see to believe.


What 1921 doesn’t achieve but what its predecessors managed is to actually sweep me up in its romantic horror tale and involve me emotionally, so the melodramatic moments tend to fall flat, more than bordering (as all intense emotion does) on involuntary humour. Still, the film’s crazy moment, its daredevil plotting and its general sense of fun are still more than enough to make for an enjoyable evening.