L7 - Movie Reivew

Story:

The young, romantic couple Arun (Adith Arun) and Sandhya (Pooja Jhaveri) end up taking on rent a possessed house troubled by a ghost.  In a day's time, the husband's car meets with an accident, and he loses his job.  Just as the wife urges Arun to vacate the inauspicious bungalow, good news comes in that she conceiving a child.  They decide to stick to the house, only to realize that the actual trouble has just begun.  

A series of eerie experiences convince Arun that all is not well. As much as they the husband tries, he can't get Sandhya out of the threshold.

It's a spirit keeping Sandhya from stepping out of the house. A flashback that firmly holds the audience's interest reveals the suspense about the ghost's origin, and impulses.  It's now up to Arun to do the ghost's bidding and save his wife.  

Analysis:

The makers of 'L7' tried their best to position the film as a horror with a difference.  The idea of there being 7 look-alikes on the planet was projected creatively through the posters.  On this count, the narration gets interesting in the second half after the mandatory doses of comedy (courtesy Vennela Kishore). 

Spooky entertainers involving a just-wed couple are nothing new.  We have had enough of them and, more often than that, they come with generous dose of sensuality.  'L7' makes sure the romantic interludes are there, but it also brings in a third character - that of a sultry woman - to titillate the audience.  The character turns out to be a mere distraction via an item song and one wonders why our directors can't transcend the temptation of such extraneous factors.  

As far as staying true to the genre is concerned, the first half passes muster with the usual doses of unconfirmed doubts about the presence of a dark force in the house, scaring through the eerie calling bell, etc. After the interval bang, there should have been a healthy balancing of comedy and seriousness.  Too much of time is wasted in drawing laughs by showing Vennela Kishore, a guest at the hero's house, spooked by the ghost.  

The LIVE chat with the possessed character while the hero executes the ghost's orders should have been creatively showcased. Instead, it borders on the banal.  

Where director Mukund Pandey, who worked with the likes of Vikram Kumar, missed a golden opportunity was in making an emotionally heart-rending ghost drama.  Since the flashback involved a very savage point with respect to a specific character, it should have been made to evoke a range of emotions during the final scenes.  The emotion of revenge should have been imaginatively mixed with the emotion of suffering to take the climax to another level.

Despite the inadequacies of the script, the director doesn't fail to extract a good performance from Pooja Jhaveri. Adith Arun is just about OK.  Vennela Kishore draws laughs to a good extent. The character of the hero's friend should have gone to a familiar face. The technical elements don't help the director in his story-telling endeavor.  The cinematography and the editing departments put up a second-rate work. Aravind-Shankar's BGM, on the other hand, manages to render justice.

Bottomline: An otherwise passable supernatural horror-thriller is helped by a decently-told flashback and climax. For the most part, though, the film is cliched in the first half. It's a wasted opportunity as well because the potential for emotional roller-coaster is not exploited fully. Pooja Jhaveri walks away with a good performance. The technical departments don't cover themselves in glory.