In short: Vazhiye (2022)

Warning: Structural spoilers are indeed a thing, and they do apply here!

Vlogger Albin (Jeffin Joseph) does suffer from a decided lack of success. This may have something to do with his penchant for videos about exciting things like cutting bottles in two with kerosene. But ghostly stuff always is popular, so he packs up his girlfriend Teena (Aswathi Anil Kumar) to camp in a supposedly haunted patch of forest for a night.

Things work out about as badly as you’d expect for the couple – and some others – though not exactly in the way you’d probably expect.

Which really is the main selling point for Nirmal Baby Varghese’s Malayalam language POV horror film. There’s a decently handled plot twist coming into the film’s final third that does play a little with audience expectations about what POV horror movies about characters camping in haunted woods do and do not do, and yet another twist to that a little later that does add cultists to the mix. Given how samey forest-based POV horror tends to get, I appreciate the filmmaker’s attempt at doing something mildly unexpected.

Alas, what does not come as a surprise is how draggy and tension-free much of the film – even after the first plot twist – feels, with scenes of quotidian nothing that go on endlessly, and little tension or characterisation. Well, there’s some potential tension coming from the feeling of seasickness caused by the shaky hands of our cameraman, and if not terribly well-composed shots of forests and jungles excite you, you may get tense and excited here.

Still, I do appreciate Vazhiye’s attempts at changing up the formula it is working with enough that I’m somewhat interested in the two(!) announced sequels.