Jarann in Marathi, is leaden with atmospheric pressure. It is almost as if writer-director Hrishikesh Gupte wants us to believe in the supernatural, but doesn’t know how to go beyond that creaky door. So we have lots of startle-the-audience moments, but nothing beyond that.
I still don’t know why the protagonist is allowed by her family to behave the way she does. That Radha (Amruta Subhash) is seriously traumatized by a road accident which takes away the life of one of her dear ones, is the ground-level drama. But what follows is not only unconvincing, it also, perhaps unintentionally, ridicules the whole concept of mental illness, particularly schizophrenia where the ill individual sees people that others can’t.
The last time I saw mental illness being so insensitively handled was in Aanand Rai’s Atrangi Re. There, at least the tone was comic, so we could dismiss the inaccuracies on mental health. Jarann wants to be taken seriously but serves up no concrete impetus to do so.
The first half is set in a village where the family gathers in an ancestral home while a weird-looking woman Ganguti (Anita Date) does black magic in one of the rooms. What is she doing there? Why is she allowed inside the house? What are her real intentions? Why are her teeth so yellow and decayed, don’t witches brush their teeth?
I am afraid Jarann has only questions, no answers. It is a work of absolute illogicality with one actor trying her best to keep the proceedings from falling apart. I could actually see the wonderful Amruta Subhash struggling to keep the oafishly orchestrated scare fare from coming apart at the seams.
That nervous tick which Amruta Subhash brings frequently into use, conveys her character Radha’s turmoil. However, the protagonist has no support from other characters who behave as though they had just joined the shooting and are yet to figure out what is happening. The two psychiatrists played by the redoubtable Kishore Kadam and Jyoti Malshe are hilariously amateurish in their medical inferences. The latter especially seems clueless as to what is happening to her patient Radha. Besides the ‘hmms’ and ‘are-you-okays’ the shrink is a joke.
The film, nervously trying to navigate through the maze of its own absurdities, needed better research on black magic, psychiatry and maybe film direction also. By simply collecting together collages of creepiness, a film cannot hope to achieve any lasting impact. Jarann leaves us scratching our heads with its presumptuous plunges at pre-empting our expectations.
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