Once Upon a Time in a Rain-Soaked, Confused Nightmare
If Bollywood ever needed proof that moody lighting and CGI fog don’t automatically equal horror, Pari (2018) is it. Directed by Prosit Roy in his feature debut and produced by Anushka Sharma’s Clean Slate Filmz, this supernatural horror flick promises demons, cults, and forbidden love—but mostly delivers a slow, soggy mess that’s half Exorcist, half Ek Tha Emotional Disaster.
The title means Fairy, but don’t expect wings, wands, or whimsy. This fairy bites dogs, vomits poison, and falls in love with a man who reacts to her demonic nature with all the emotional range of a cardboard cutout. If Beauty and the Beasttook place in a swamp during monsoon season and everyone forgot how to emote, you’d get Pari.
Meet Rukhsana: The Girl Next Door (If You Live Next to Hell)
Anushka Sharma plays Rukhsana, a woman chained up in a shack deep in the forest. She’s dirty, feral, and possibly allergic to shampoo. When her captor (an old woman who looks like she moonlights as a scarecrow) gets hit by a car, she’s found by Arnab (Parambrata Chatterjee), a man whose defining characteristic is… that he owns a printing press.
Arnab feels guilty for killing the old lady and decides to take Rukhsana home because, clearly, adopting a mysterious forest woman with no social skills and visible trauma is the responsible thing to do. He gives her a place to stay, feeds her, and ignores the fact that she keeps hallucinating demonic figures, spitting poison, and occasionally looks like she’s auditioning for The Grudge: Kolkata Edition.
It’s a love story—if you define “love” as “I feel bad for you but also you might murder me in my sleep.”
A Demon Walks Into a Family Drama
The movie’s big idea is that Rukhsana isn’t human—she’s the child of a satanic ritual gone wrong. A Bangladeshi cult called Auladhchakra (which sounds like a yoga class for the damned) has been summoning a demon named Ifrit to impregnate kidnapped women, creating half-human, half-demonic offspring.
Professor Qasim Ali (Rajat Kapoor, doing his best “haunted scholar with bad lighting” impression) leads a group of demon-hunting vigilantes who track down these cursed babies and decapitate them like ghostly watermelons. It’s gruesome, sure, but it’s also about as subtle as a lecture on sin delivered with a chainsaw.
When the good professor learns Rukhsana’s still alive, he and his merry band of zealots decide to finish what they started—because nothing says “moral authority” like murdering infants and imprisoning traumatized women.
Romance, Possession, and the World’s Worst Sex Scene
For reasons known only to screenwriter Nathan Parker and possibly the Devil himself, Arnab starts falling for Rukhsana. Forget that she drools blood and talks to shadows—she’s quirky!
Their love story builds with all the grace of a drunk man assembling IKEA furniture. They share long, awkward silences, meaningful stares, and eventually, a night of passion that raises more questions than it answers. Did no one think to check for demon contraception?
The next day, Rukhsana starts vomiting black goo again, and Arnab looks surprised—as if he didn’t notice he was dating someone who snacks on live animals. Their chemistry is so dry it could spontaneously combust if exposed to fire.
The Tone: Half Exorcism, Half Soap Opera
Prosit Roy’s direction seems torn between arthouse horror and emotional melodrama. The first half feels like it’s trying to be Hereditary; the second half feels like Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna—if Rani Mukerji were possessed by Beelzebub.
There’s potential here: the premise of demons as inherited trauma, the blurred line between love and sin. But the execution is so heavy-handed you can practically hear the director whispering, “See? This is symbolic,” every time a crow flies across the frame.
The cinematography is all gloomy blues and greens, which might’ve worked if every scene didn’t look like it was shot through a dirty aquarium. Combine that with a sound design that mistakes loud for scary, and you’ve got a film that spends more time trying to convince you it’s deep than actually saying anything.
The Supporting Cast: Victims of the Script
Rajat Kapoor’s Professor Qasim Ali spends the entire movie looking constipated with guilt, muttering about divine justice like a man who once lost a chess game to Satan and never recovered. His motivations are muddier than the rain-soaked set he’s perpetually standing in.
Ritabhari Chakraborty plays Piyali, Arnab’s fiancée and the only character with an ounce of common sense. Naturally, the film sidelines her in favor of giving more screen time to close-ups of Anushka Sharma’s haunted eyes.
And then there’s Mansi Multani as Kalapori, the cult’s resident witch and motivational speaker for demons. She’s the film’s only source of genuine menace, which probably explains why she appears for five minutes before vanishing into a puff of exposition.
The Horror: Demonic… Feelings?
Let’s talk scares—or rather, the lack thereof. Pari tries every trick in the book: jump scares, eerie sound cues, and CGI spirits crawling out of nowhere. Unfortunately, it’s all so repetitive that by the third time Rukhsana hisses at a shadow, you start rooting for the demon just to spice things up.
Even the gore feels half-hearted. There’s some blood, a few dead dogs, and a lot of people staring off into the middle distance like they’re trying to remember their lines. It’s a horror film where the most frightening thing is the pacing.
The real terror comes from realizing you’re 90 minutes in and there’s still no clear sense of what’s happening. Are the demons literal? Metaphorical? Symbolic of patriarchy? Who knows! The script certainly doesn’t.
The Ending: Love Conquers Demons (But Not Confusion)
In the climax, Rukhsana’s pregnancy advances faster than the plot ever did. Professor Ali captures her, tortures her, and then gets promptly murdered for his trouble. Rukhsana goes into labor, and Piyali—nurse, fiancée, moral backbone—helps deliver her demon baby because, well, nurse.
Rukhsana dies dramatically in Arnab’s arms, whispering that their child is human because her love made it so. It’s meant to be tragic. It’s really just confusing. If true love can cure demon DNA, someone please inform the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
The movie ends with Arnab raising the baby, haunted by guilt and rainclouds, while a voiceover assures us that love triumphs over evil. Honestly, at that point, I was just glad something had triumphed over the runtime.
The Message (I Think?): Demons Are People Too
Beneath the demonic pregnancy and exorcism drama, Pari wants to say something profound about humanity and compassion. Unfortunately, it keeps forgetting what that message is.
Is it about religious fanaticism? Female trauma? The nature of evil? Probably all three—but the film handles each theme like it’s juggling flaming chainsaws in a downpour. What could’ve been a tight, subversive horror ends up feeling like a group project where everyone turned in a different essay.
Final Verdict: Pari Needs an Exorcism of Its Own
Pari is a brave attempt at elevating Indian horror beyond haunted mansions and ghostly aunties, but ambition doesn’t always equal clarity. It’s atmospheric but aimless, moody but muddled, and ultimately about as scary as a malfunctioning fog machine.
Anushka Sharma gives a committed, physical performance—crawling, screaming, and crying through gallons of fake rain—but even she can’t save a movie that doesn’t know if it wants to be a love story or a religious pamphlet.
By the time the credits roll, you’ll be left wondering two things: what just happened, and why didn’t it happen 30 minutes sooner?
Final Score: 2 out of 5 Poison-Breath Fairies.
Pari wanted to be India’s answer to Pan’s Labyrinth. Instead, it’s Pan’s Labyrinth if Guillermo del Toro had been possessed by a confused film student with a fog fetish.
