Why 'Nayyi Navelli' isn't a fun horr-com nor a compelling mythological

In Nayyi Navelli, what you see is not what you get. Bantu (Anurag Thakur) is convinced that his bhabhi Mohini (Yami Gautam) is “Ramsay Bros wali daayan” a.k.a. witch and sets out to convince everyone in the Awasthi household that there’s more to her than meets the eye. This is when audiences are supposedly watching a horror comedy but what they get is only a few laugh-worthy moments and next to zero scares. The way these scenes unfold with scores of family members seated in the aangaan (courtyard) at times listening and wondering, and at other times berating and taunting Bantu in an exaggerated way, it almost feels more like a sitcom than a feature film. It doesn’t help that for most of the first half, Yami’s Mohini is seen only through Bantu’s dubious eyes and unending narration. So far so meh.

The drastic tonal U-turn the story takes at the end of the first half is where Nayyi Navelli loses logic, and the audience. From a horror comedy, the film turns into a mythological tale with Mohini spewing an endless yarn involving Ravan, his sister Mandodari, Ram, Duryodhan and many other godly figures, and a prized stone called ‘Kaal Sheel’ that’s gone missing and has to be recovered at all costs. The trouble is that it never seems as calamitous as it is being made out. What makes it worse is that one couldn’t care less what happens to any of the characters who have to face the predicament.

Directed by Balaji Mohan from a screenplay by Divy Nidhi Sharma (who also wrote the dialogues), based on a story by Himanshu Sharma, Nayyi Navelli’s sole distinction is that it gives a heroine the spotlight and the muscle. It’s Mohini who is doing all the preaching, mediating and protecting, and she is not bad at it. But that doesn’t stop it all from seeming contrived and unserious. When she isn’t doing all the heavy-lifting, there are a bunch of talented actors, including Mita Vashisht, Sunita Rajwar of Gullak and Panchayat fame, Thakur and Sonal Jha, who are either turned into caricatures or criminally wasted. Try as hard they may to enliven the proceedings, it all comes to nought.

After a point watching Nayyi Navelli feels more like a discourse in Hinduism with all the iconography on display and a protracted climax in which audiences can play ‘see the weapon, guess the god’. The issue is not with the gods—it’s with the way the humans involved in the film’s making presume they would have the audience’s attention just by invoking and projecting the gods. Not everyone is a S.S. Rajamouli or Rishab Shetty to cleverly intersperse religious motifs into their narratives and make them engaging. This is a film too occupied in its grandstanding ways to actually tell a compelling story about its superheroine.

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