Bhoot Part One: The Haunted Ship (2020)

Director: Bhanu Pratap Singh

Writer: Bhanu Pratap Singh

Cast: Vicky Kaushal, Ashutosh Rana, Meher Vij, Akash Dhar, Sara Gesawat

Foreign horror is really something you should get into if you’re looking for some of the most culturally unique filmmaking out there. So many countries have their own telling flair indicative of their own brand for scaring us to death. Japanese horror is something that is very familiar with many of us. It’s so terrifying that we in the United States have tried to adapt stories like Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge so domestic audiences can enjoy them (to no avail, because let’s face it, we’re no good at foreign adaptations). There’s Italian horror that has a style all on its own that practically bred its own subgenre, Giallo. Then we have India, a country that is home to Bollywood, the second largest film industry in the world, whose horror is nothing short of…well, forgettable. Before sitting down to watch Bhoot Part One – The Haunted Ship (which I’ll just be calling Bhoot for the remainder of this review) I wasn’t expecting a movie that I’d find memorable enough after the credits to write about. I’m happy to say that I was pleasantly surprised and actually had fun watching this film.

Bhoot is a tale about a lost ship that is mysteriously beached on the shore of India and a surveying officer’s discovery that there’s a spirit haunting the vessel. I was impressed by Vicky Kaushal’s performance as surveying officer Prithvi. The character had some depth to him that through the performance was upheld as far as possible. The relationship between Prithvi and his daughter was warm and genuine, making it easy for me to connect and sympathize with him. After losing his daughter and wife in a rafting accident, Prithvi falls into a depression that haunts him as much as the spirit haunts the ship, or at least I wanted it to. His mental health had the potential to send his arc into a really dark place, but we never got there. It’s mentioned by Professor, and human MacGuffin, Joshi (Ashutosh Rana) that Prithvi has hallucinations of his family whenever he skips on taking his antidepressants, a promising statement that barely gets any return on investment. I would have loved to have seen Prithvi plunge into some sort of psychosis between seeing his family and witnessing a haunting that would have made this plot much darker, but there were other plans here.

The first half of this movie had me hooked for a while. There were nonstop scares that were smartly shot and perfectly timed, causing unrelenting terror that brought my heart rate up as soon as it came down from the last jump. Then I realized exactly that. Time had passed, and I was starting to wonder where we were going with this. Surely this movie is more than all scare and minimal story. I got a run-of-the-mill ghost tale for most of the first half, something that started to feel a little like a rip-off of 2002’s Ghost Ship, which I really like. The feeling of monotony didn’t last, however, and the gears switched rather abruptly in the second half, almost making me beg for that monotony back. Through the explanation of our recurring MacGuffin, our simple haunt story is now that of possession (by a stroke of a lucky guess that everyone just ran with)! Plot twist!…I guess. Minutes into the third act we now have a mostly different movie, with new characters introduced and a rushed, last-second cramming of exposition that sacrificed the charming horror of the first act and replaced it with a murder mystery that happened to have a ghost with an apparent ability to use the Force as it tossed objects and people with its mind and literally force choked our hero who somehow finds out how to defeat the spirit without previously given any clues for how to do it. Dumb luck is the twine tying the third act together and had it kept to the plot of the first and second acts, the ending would have been much tighter. I just hope that Bhoot Part Two will tie up some loose ends and untie some poorly done knots—namely that mid-credit scene where our evil spirit returns despite being inexplicably killed (Rekilled? What’s the kill equivalent for a ghost?).

I will give credit to some elements of the film though—it’s definitely not without its home runs. Visually, this is one hell of a brilliant watch. Every shot is thought out meticulously, especially during scenes that are meant for scares. Director Bhanu Pratap Singh’s use of one-point perspective and depth of field were frequent but smartly placed to manipulate our attention and send us into a place of dread in ways that were obviously inspired by the likes of Stanley Kubrick. What I found particularly beautiful was Singh’s ability to keep the look of the movie dark and foreboding and somehow keeping the vibrancy and color that make Bollywood films so gorgeous. It’s not easy to tread between the dark and the light, but Singh nails it and is quite exceptional with visual storytelling.

Bhoot is a thrilling exception to the typically drab Indian horror scene. It’s got feelings of The Grudge, The Ring, and Ghost Ship all rolled into one with the Bollywood flair that makes for one hell of a fun watch, story be damned. However, given some questions left unanswered I’m left feeling a bit hopeful and admittedly intrigued to see what Bhoot Part 2 will have to offer.

Bhoot Part One – The Haunted Ship is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.