Andhar Maya on Zee5, in 7 episodes in Marathi, has a tonally felicitous feel to it. You feel you are in the midst of something ominous, something eerie. But the series never reaches the culmination that it seems to promise initially when an entire clan of property seekers descend after the death of the patriarch in Konkan village.
This is well-trodden territory. For it to impress us, there needed to be far more enormity in the content. Director Bhimrao Mude and his writers adhere to familiar terror tropes like that patent someone-is-watching camera angle that is here pushed in anytime there is a scarcity of genuine moodiness, and that is quite frequent.
The well-known Marathi actor Kishore Kadam pretty much holds the show together, although there are way too many closeups of his face expressing an unnecessary grotesquerie. His role gets progressively ghoulish until we reach the closing episode where a heavily pregnant woman is spooked much more than the audience.
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The crux of the crisis in Andhar Maya — and there is genuine absence of consistency in the fear factor — is that we never feel the fear that the old ancestral home supposedly secretes. Instead, we get actors acting scared rather than feeling it.
There is the core issue of the property’s deceased owner’s gender ambivalence. The man used to perform on stage in drag and apparently maintained his drag act even at home. The writers (Kapil Bhopatkar, Pralhad Kudtarkar) forfeit any serious exploration of gender conflicts beneath the surface scares.
The crumbling ancestral home remains the star of the show. As a warning for those inheritors who are in a hurry to sell off their ancestors’ nurturing premise, Andhar Maya just about passes muster. As a spook vehicle, it fails miserably for no fault of its own. When you allot just one ominous crumbling venue and very little of any other ingredient that goes into the making of a notable horror experience, this is what we get. Take it or leave it.
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