Thamma Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi

Rarely do you come across a film that doesn’t know whether it wants to scare you, save you, or sell you a dance number.

So it just does all three. Badly. Guts.

Alok is a hack journalist who goes on a trek with his hacky friends. Upon getting lost in the woods and being attacked by a grizzly bear, he is rescued by Tadaka, whom he instantly falls in love with, without realising she is a Betaal — a undead woman with immense power who survives on animal blood. Why animal not human you ask? The film will tell you in a most tone-deaf sequence about the partition of India and resultant violence, im not making it up.

As the world’s dumbest screenplay goes on, Tadaka too falls for Alok duh, and together they must defeat Thama, the evil most high order Betaal. Because this is now a cross-over universe, Bhediya is also in the mix, for blood drinking reasons.

Horror-comedy filmon par ek burden hota hai, built into the genre- a clear and somewhat obviously visible REASON required for it to exist.

KYUN koi naye worlds banaakar, naye rule ijaad karke, manghadant kahaaniyon se dekhne wale ko daraana chaahta hai, POORI tarah bhaybheet na karke. Horror ko istemaal kar, jiss mudde ke baare mein consumer ko agaah karne ki koshish ki jaa rahi hai, usmein comedy ke notes laa kar, bataaur writer aapka prayatn hai ki baat ghar kar jaaye, chaahey chutkulon ki madad se hi sahi. Gaye saalon mein Stree, Bhediya, Bhool Bhulaiyya — Sexism, ecological imbalance, andhvishwaas — naye waali Bhool Bhuliayya rather astonishingly had a protagonist struggling with their trans-identity. Hollywood ki taraf dekho- Jim Jarmusch ki ‘The Dead Don’t Die’, Mark Mylod’s Ralph Fiennes starrer ‘The Menu’, Tim Burton’s ‘Beetlejuice’, nearly each title has one main social evil it aims to speak against, albeit decorated with gags and slapstick humour, to make it all go down.

Thamma, despite being co-written by the very reliable Niren Bhatt, feels like the end product of a thought experiment where the goal IS to make the film about as many social evils as possible in one film, jumping between all of them without much pause as long as the main emphasis remains on dance numbers. Let me explain with examples.

A pandit trying to scam a family at a funeral ki beta aapka swarg pohonch gaya hai paise do, a few sequences later, a preacher is seen shouting on TV at his congregation claiming to rid people of evil, means religion is misused as a trap by the conniving against the vulnerable. On the same TV are news anchors yelling fake news, Alok himself is a journalist who hires actors for his new stories. At the beginning of Alok’s arc, he is confident young buffoon who says “main Baniya hai beta hoon”, as a threat to the Betal trying to kidnap him. Eventually, he turns INTO one of the Betal people as a direct result of his love for Tadaka. His father OPPOSES this conversion vehementaly, even takes Alok to the preacher mentioned above. The father is painted as the bad guy for not understanding this inter-species(?) love. This allegory is a two-parter- the foolishness of assumed caste superiority and purity, and perhaps even a comment on a parents unable to accept their children for who they really are. The fights between Paresh Rawal and Ayushmman khurana are almost constsnt, in moments it feels like they’re talking about a child coming out of the closet.

If one is desperately looking for meaning in the film, and probably’s one’s choice to WATCH it, one may also say the film wants to comment on the erasure of indigenous cultures. The first two things Alok does when he brings her to Delhi is change her name from Tadaka to the more acceptable “Tarika” and get her more modest clothes to wear.

You ALSO get glimpses of anti-fascist sentiment — the title is Thama, the name of the main villain who loses all control when given unchecked power for too long, Alok even declares at one point, aaj ke baad koi kisi ke saamne sir nahi jhukaayega.

And look, why these rapid races to rectify “issues we must address”, a greatest hits compilation of social evils as themes, is worth highlighting, because the film keeps changing the stakes and central conflict based on the flavour of that half hour in the screenplay, none of it clever. My brain and pen went into a tizzy trying to keep track of everything, eventually concluding that it isn’t actually about ANYTHING. But hey, if you’re a pre-pubescent young man looking for a sequence with an underground dance bar that is only patronised by undead Betaals, one of whom is a police officer who drinks Alexander The Great’s blood, as Nora Fatehi dances to Arabic tunes for your pleasure, you’re in the right place.

The horror isn’t horroring either- I find it exceedingly difficult to take Nawazuddin Siddiqui seriously in a role where he is singing a gender altered version of “panchi banu udti phiroo” while in shackles, fluttering like a bat. The comedic punches land a sum total of 2 times, once when an unusually out-of-form Ayushman Khurana calls Bhediya Vikaspuri ka Wolverine and another time when he first realises he has turned into a Betal, as the community’s dramatic war cry of “Rakthrambha, Sashaktrambha” slips through his lips. The rest of it is a desperate attempt to emulate versions of Star-Lord, Drax, Neytiri, Mugatu, Kantara, and every father character Paresh Rawal has played, ever.