Bhoot Part One: The Haunted Ship is Adrift in a Sea of Mediocrity

The year is 2003.

I am eleven years old and just beginning to get into horror films. Ram Gopal Varma’s Bhoot
(Ghost) starring Ajay Devgn and Urmila Matondkar has released in theatres and a well-
meaning but reckless relative has generously offered to take me and my younger brother to
see it. An hour and fifty three minutes later (excluding intermission), I leave the theatre a
changed person, astonished by my profound capacity for fear and an even more profound
appetite for it. Over the next few years, my brother and I will steadfastly refuse to travel
alone to the first floor of our house, obscurely convinced that untold terrors of the
supernatural variety lurk there. I will also simultaneously seek out every horror film and
book I can get my hands on. I am, irrevocably and undeniably, hooked.
Cut to 2020.
Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions has announced the release of Bhoot Part One: The
Haunted Ship. The news is exciting in its unexpectedness because the horror genre is
outside this production company’s usual wheelhouse. In India, Hindi-language horror films
are relegated to a niche status; most are budget productions with middling names attached
to them. Bhoot Part One: The Haunted Ship therefore, represents something of a departure
from this trend, helmed by a prestigious team and starring Vicky Kaushal, beloved by fans
and critics alike. Done right, and coming on the heels of other inventive horror offerings like
Tumbadd (2018), Pari (2018), and Stree (2018), it could signal the mainstreaming of a
hitherto woefully neglected genre. Does Bhoot Part One, then, live up to this challenge?
Reader, it does not.
Though the title of the movie is an undeniable throwback to the 2003 production, the two
are standalone films with no common link. Based on a real incident from 2011 when a cargo
ship ran aground on a Mumbai beach, Bhoot Part One tells the story of survey officer Prithvi
Prakashan (Vicky Kaushal) who is charged with the task of clearing the Sea Bird, a shipping
vessel, off Juhu beach. Fresh off the tragedy of losing his wife Sapna (Bhumi Pednekar) and
young daughter Megha in a rafting incident, Prithvi is a haunted man and thus the perfect
choice to explore a notoriously haunted ship. A man who skips prescribed pills so he can
continue experiencing hallucinations of his dead wife and daughter, he is supposed to
embody the well-worn trope of the unreliable narrator who is unable to distinguish
between bizarre supernatural occurrences and his own crumbling psyche. The set-design of
the ship is gorgeous; ten-stories high and unmoored from its place, its stately and ravaged
interior is meant to mirror the corridors of Prithvi’s own tormented soul.
The conceit, unfortunately, is poorly executed. Before Prithvi can even climb aboard the
ship, its resident ghost claims the lives of a thrill seeking couple who, in a moving tribute to
the difficulty of finding a little privacy in an expensive mega metropolis where people live
cheek by jowl, decide to use the abandoned ship for a tryst. The woman’s dead body is
promptly found and broadcast on news media. The viewer, therefore, is not in doubt for a
second that the haunting is real and the film’s attempt to signal a deeper subtext about the
vagaries of grief and its psychic toll on a person by representing Prithvi’s perspective as
warped by his own demons is merely wasted screen time.
Grief, which has no social script, has always had a special relationship with horror. The best
of global horror explores the terror, unpredictability, and isolation of grief, often the result
of some traumatic loss, and is able to accommodate its spiky lineaments in ways that
perhaps no other genre can. Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water (2002) J. A. Bayona’s El Orfanato
(2007), Nick Murphy’s The Awakening (2011), Guillermo del Toro’s Mama (2013), and Ari
Aster’s Hereditary (2018) are just a few recent examples of the same. The figure of the
ghost, so central to a vast majority of horror films, is an embodiment (en-spirit-ment?) of
that very grief. As scholar Murray Leeder writes in Cinematic Ghosts, “the ghost is a
powerful, versatile metaphor. It can signify the ways in which memory and history, whether
traumatic, nostalgic, or both, linger on within the ‘living present.’ It can be a potent
representation of and figure of resistance for those who are unseen and unacknowledged,
reduced to a spectral half-presence by dominant culture and official history.”
The ghosts of Sapna and Megha represent Prithvi’s guilt at being unable to save his family
while the apparition on the ship encapsulates a sordid tale of betrayal and revenge that we
will gloss over in the interest of remaining spoiler free. While the trappings of loss and grief
are all there – in Vicky Kaushal’s unshaven face and bloodshot eyes, in shots of his messy,
uncared for apartment, in his reckless endangerment of himself – they remain just that:
trappings. The true physical and emotional vulnerability of grief – the quality that makes
viewers invested in and fearful for the protagonist of a horror narrative – is markedly absent
from the film.
Part of the reason, interestingly enough, has to do with lead actor Vicky Kaushal’s new off-
screen image. In January 2019, Vicky Kaushal starred as the lead in Uri: The Surgical Strike, a
military propaganda film based on a real incident from 2016 in the contested region of
Jammu and Kashmir where four terrorists attacked Indian security forces. Tensions between
India and Pakistan were at an all-time high in the aftermath, spilling easily into cultural
domain where Pakistani actors and artistes were summarily banned from Indian
productions and those who resisted in the name of promoting peace and amity were held
hostage to majoritarian sentiments. The film is a dramatization of retaliation by Indian
troops, the retaliation itself being met with scepticism from only a few quarters but general
laudatory celebration from mainstream media and civil society. The film went on to become
a massive commercial success and one of its dialogues spoken by Kaushal – “How’s the josh
(Energy)?” “High, Sir!” – a testament to the strength and aggression of a new breed of
patriotic Indians has since been a viral mainstay of cultural discourse, is routinely chanted at
military academies, and was even said by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at an event later
that year. Vicky Kaushal, who received a National Film Award for his role, transformed
overnight from an indie presence to a symbol of aggressive, jingoistic machismo.
That whiff of machismo haunts Kaushal in Bhoot to the detriment of character and plot.
Early in the film, there is a scene of Kaushal singlehandedly rescuing a dozen female victims
of human trafficking; he tackles three men at once with his bare hands in pouring rain at the
docks as the women cower behind him. Later his best friend Riaz (Akash Dhar), a supporting
character, makes subtext text by comparing him to superheroes. The climax also relies on
superhuman feats of strength, the camera lovingly tracking his muscular frame in long
sustained shots. There is not a moment in the film where the viewer fears for his safety,
heroic redemption seems inevitable. In Bhoot Part One, therefore, neither the haunting nor
the haunted are much more than ciphers for a derivative hodge-podge of elements from
better films. Creepy dolls, wall-crawling young women, voiceover lullabies, jump scares –
we’ve seen it all before. The musical score by Ketan Sodha is effective when it is restrained
in the service of building tension but succumbs to the temptation of operatic excess when
the action heats up.
The scariest part of Bhoot Part One: The Haunted Ship is the threat, embedded within the
title itself, of a sequel.