Karma

Karma : Crime, Passion and Reincarnation is on the brink of being one of those movies that everybody wishes was never made. But it saves itself with its brevity and compactness and some above- average direction by M R Shahjahan.

It is the story of a young wife, Anna (Alma Saraci), who brings her husband Vik (Carlucci Weyant) to his hometown Ooty to reunite with his estranged father Ranvir (Vijayendra Ghatge). There she experiences immense Déjà vu and the rest , you’ll figure out in the first ten minutes of the movie. Watch if  you particularly enjoy watching Indian actors converse in artificial porcelain English!

The movie begins with Anna and Vik coming down to Ooty. All is well in paradise and one wonders why there is a pseudo-haunting background score playing. Anna is delighted to be here and she fits right in. She touches her new sasu-ji’s feet and brings him tea in the morning, the perfect bahu. Vik, on the other hand, is just not happy to be back. He is angry with his father for separating from his mother and walks around the house perpetually annoyed.

Daddy is delighted that his only son is back and welcomes him home with a big party. While Anna is living it up, socializing with the Indians, a strange man blows cigarette smoke on her face. FREEZE. Eerie music ensues and Anna has her first-ever VISION. The whole room spins around her, there are masked people dancing everywhere, it looks like fun, maybe it is fun. The next thing we know, she’s waking up disoriented on a bed, not knowing what to do! Poor thing, this really wasn’t what she signed up for when she decided to come to sasural, did she?

Anna’s problems now manifest in less neurotic ways, she knows the city inside out, even though she’s never been there before. She decides she wants to go to Lawrence University and her angry young husband obliges. There she first sees the troubled ghost, Linda. Then, in a bar, she has another déjà vu incident and annoys the old bar owner.

A few more minor déjà vu incidents follow. Each such incident is preceeded by around 2 minutes of eerie ghost music, just in case the viewer wanted a warning. Worry not; the movie is un-scary to a fault. Barbie dolls are scarier!

Slowly, the movie unravels a detailed death of a young Austrian woman Linda (Claudia Siesla) murdered by the masked man Anna had been seeing. Soon, through more un-scary visions, it dawns on Anna that she is actually Linda and her mind will not rest in peace until she finds out who was responsible. Thus ensues her husband’s disbelief, some marital tiffs and finally acceptance. He approaches the inspector who, for some reason acts terribly menacing, despite the fact that he is playing only a minor supporting good guy role with no real weight, tells him, in not so many words to, google it. The awkward and inappropriate inspector leaves one wondering if the director should use a more stringent casting process in future.

He reads newspaper articles of her disappeance, and simultaneously, Anna, through her visions, realizes what happened. Linda was at a party in the woods. A masked man, whom she mistook as her lover, lures her into a shack and there she dies. This scene is slickly done, and ends up as the climax even though it isn’t meant to be.

Husband and wife pack their bags and take off to New York, but, on the way, there is a painfully predictable tyre problem and this leads Anna to a house where she meets Liz who leads her to the final climax which lasts about 30 seconds with one short bang.

Carlucci Weyant is painfully overdone as the angry young man and one wishes he’d do yoga to calm himself. Towards the end, his performance becomes more believable. Alma Saraci could have stop mouth breathing at every sign of discomfort. Nevertheless, she holds the movie together with her easy acting in most part of the movie. Vijayendra Ghatge has a powerful scene at the end which he executes finely. Claudia Siesla is not worth a mention. Music is inappropriately placed in far too many places to forgive.

The movie might be worth seeing for its unusual artistic execution and possibly for its meager storyline. Otherwise, its predictable to a fault and seems like a well-mixed mélange of Skeleton Key and Raaz. Watch, for the lack of something better to do.

Bollywood director M.R. Shahjahan seems to be living in the 70s and 80s when movies like Karma were accepted for a while. In fact, it seems to be highly ‘inspired’ by the film 1980s film ‘Kudrat’. The plot is hackneyed and extremely predictable and it seems like there is nothing that can surprise the audience in the movie.

The plot starts off with Anna (Alma Saraci) and Vik (Carlucci Weyant) being married and Anna insisting that Vik settle his issues with his estranged father in India Ranvir (Vijayendra Ghatge). On arriving in India, Anna experiences strange visions and a feeling of déjà vu in the surroundings though she has never been to that place or for that matter to the country before. After a while of pondering, (not for the audience who has already guessed a case of rebirth) they deduce that she is a reincarnation of Linda (Claudia Ciesla) who lived in the same place and was killed. The story continues with Linda haunting Anna and motivating her to solve the crime.

 The use of elements to create a ‘horror movie’ experience is clichéd and manages to bore the audience completely than incite any fear. The killer’s identity is known to the audience way before the mystery is solved as it is very obvious. Many parts of the story are not made to clear either for example, the reason behind the father-son estrangement.

 The actors’ performances are just mediocre. Claudia Ciesla doesn’t seem to have much of a future in Bollywood due to her lack of acting ability or any screen presence and no guys, the film comes without her much talked about topless scene. Carlucci Weyant carries the same expression throughout the movie and Vijayendra Ghatge seems uninterested. Only Alma Saraci is worth mentioning as she is quite chilling as the spirit. The editing and cinematography are the best parts of the movie and the way past and present times are shown is impressive.

A really dull film, I wouldn’t really recommend it. It’s one of those movies whose story you already know and would watch for the way it has been presented but that is again not impressive and you will only waste your time.