Table of Contents

Introduction

Review of Munjya: The newest entry in Dinesh Vijan’s horror universe, Munjya misses the chance to create a truly unique bad lad whose resentful love for an older woman sustains it after all these years.

The creators of “Stree” and “Bhediya,” “Munjya,” combine comedy and spooky terror in a very Maddock-esque way; the former succeeds more than the latter, but both have a significant impact.

The Plot

The narrative starts in 1952, when Goya, a young Brahmin boy, wanted to wed Munni, who was seven years his senior. He follows various rituals in the forest because his family doesn’t agree, but he unfortunately dies in the process and is buried beneath a tree. In the present day, Bittu (Abhay Verma), a nerdy college student from Pune, works at a salon alongside his mother Pammi (Mona Singh) and cherishes his time spent with his aaji (Suhas Joshi) at home. He harbors feelings for Bella (Sharvari), his childhood friend, but he is hesitant to let her know since she is seeing Kuba, an Englishman.

Bittu frequently experiences nightmares and muffled voice coming from Munjya’s haunting peepal tree. He soon travels to the village with his mother and grandmother to meet their relatives, where Bittu discovers long-forgotten details about his father’s life and the family’s connection to the dangerous location known as chetuk-baari, where Munjya’s soul resides in peepal trees. When Bittu becomes trapped by Munjya, his entire life is turned upside down, and the story takes a humorous turn that is both unexpected and predictable.

Sadly, despite its heavy reliance on jump scares and a computer-generated ghoul, “Munjya” is neither funny-haha nor does it make you want to peek under your seat.

It is based on a Konkan legend that employs the notion of the “munjya,” a young man who passes away before reaching adulthood and whose soul emerges to satisfy unfulfilled wishes.

Is Munjya a Real Story? Is Munjya a Horror Movie?

I was engrossed in the opening thirty minutes of the two-hour film when Bittu (Verma) of today returns to his ancestral village with his mother (Mona Singh) and grandmother (Joshi). There, he encounters the “munjya,” which causes a catastrophic detour. But things only get worse from there.

If you enjoy this kind of stuff, part of the allure of supernatural stories is the curiosity they arouse about how little we actually know about our world and how much lies beneath the surface. The tension is increased and the major reveal is made with the help of black flashes and suggestive clues.

Here, following an unexpected turn of events, the evil of the confrontational “munjya” is purposefully subdued to become more obnoxious than frightening, which lessens the impact of this drawn-out story.

Reaching for the realm of Casper the friendly ghost (or is it the long-fingered Gollum from “The Lord of the Rings”), “Munjya” misses the chance to create a truly unique bad lad whose resentful longing for an older girl sustains it after all these years. The movie’s attempts to become a family-friendly production fall flat.

After a strong start, the plot starts to veer off course. Taran Singh, the hero’s Sardar best friend, appears purely for comic effect. A sort of exorcism led by a godman who loves Jesus (Sathyaraj) and Bittu’s own personal entanglements, including her old friend Bela (Sharvari) and her bumbling foreign beau, are also thrown in. The link between the “munjya” and oppressive patriarchy is highlighted, but it doesn’t really make an impact.

You have sympathy for the curly-haired, bespectacled Bittu, a la Harry Potter; Verma pulls off an earnest, perplexed look quite nicely. Joshi stands recognized as the grandmother who makes “puran-poli.” As always, the verdant Konkan scenery is visually appealing. However, and this applies to the entire movie, Mona Singh, who plays the encouraging mother of the young hero, should have done a better job with the script: she is capable of being wonderful, incredibly fiery.

Is Munjya a Real Story? Is Munjya a Horror Movie?

Munjya is a horror comedy that brings pop culture excess and Konkani legend together, often inadvertently bringing out the eerie side. It is clumsy and confused, requiring the voluntary suspension of disbelief but failing to achieve it.

Directed by Aditya Sarpotdar and written by Niren Bhatt, the Maddock Films movie is the fourth in the banner’s slate of spooky films, following Roohi, Bhediya, and Stree. The story was devised by Yogesh Chandekar. It is probably only slightly better than Roohi and nowhere near as good as Stree and Bhediya.

Beyond the terror aspect that feeds the genre, Stree and Bhediya tackled subjects that were far more profound. Whereas the latter utilized the metaphor of a beast on the prowl to promote environmental protection, the former used the occult to highlight female empowerment. Does Munjya accomplish anything more than combine a lighthearted sense of humor with a fear of the dark? Not exactly.

Munjya tells us, at best, that fear overcomes us because we shrink away from it. Someone advises Bittu (Abhay Verma), a young guy who works in his mother’s beauty parlor and longs to be free of his apron ties, “Face it and resist it and victory will be yours.”

Munjya feels much longer than its two hours because, often, the difficult-to-digest twaddle gives way to the mumbo-jumbo that it thrusts onto us. It revolves around a fight between a child who can’t understand his nightmares and a monster from the underworld. Many believe he is high. He finds it difficult to deny them the suspicion.

The overly protective Bittu’s mother, Pammi (Mona Singh), cringes at the thought of the young man leaving the nest to pursue his own path and find better opportunities. He must deal with more than just his mother, though. Munjya, the child-demon, is more cunning than malevolent and follows Bittu with great determination.

Thirty years ago, in a quaint and beautiful Konkan village by the sea, a young man falls in love with an older female and passes just a few days after his mundan. His unfulfilled passion transforms him into a lovelorn ghoul that looks for human sacrifice as compensation—a ritual he was unable to perform while still a living, breathing kid.

Munjya searches for Munni, the girl he loved but lost, following Bittu from the forest all the way to Pune. Bittu’s boyhood buddy Bela (Sharvari Wagh), who is older than him but still the subject of repressed love, unintentionally falls victim to a transaction that puts her life in jeopardy.

The CGI creature, an impish, Gremlin-like creature that prances around at random, lacks a terrifying effect on the viewer, and the visual effects are primitive. Only Bittu can see Munjya, who won’t let the boy go until his wishes are fulfilled. That portends problems for the movie as well as Bittu. Both the beast and the movie alternate between different forms. Munjya never quite finds a firm foundation.

An air of mystery and unease is created by the use of thunder, lightning, sea waves, menacing shadows in the forest, and a tree with a tentacled trunk. However, Munjya never succeeds in seducing the audience to believe the ludicrous and erroneous story it tells.

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Fear, alarm, or empathy are not evoked by the sly CGI creature or the youngster he torments. Yes, there is an attempt to make Bittu appear like a miniature version of Harry Potter; after all, he is a man who needs to look within himself to uncover the magic that will enable him to defeat Munjya.

No matter how many falls he has, Bittu never loses his spectacles. He wears his spectacles while he sleeps. We definitely want him to get out of his current situation, but his Sikh friend and confidant Diljit Singh Dhillon, a videographer with aspirations to become a director, is far more fascinating than the stressed-out child.

Elvis Karim Prabhakar, a charlatan, enters the scene late in the movie and claims to have the “hand of god” to drive out ghosts. Bittu and his friend witness him hawk his miracle. They ask for his assistance in fending off Munjya. The conflict returns to the forest where it all started. It’s free for all after that.

Munjya is rarely creepy enough to elicit jump scares, despite being expertly filmed by cinematographer Saurabh Goswami. Everything seems so unrealistic that an animated movie would have made a lot better movie. Live action tends to over-literalize everything, thus undermining the concept’s underlying interest. The writers and the director would have had more creative freedom to take the imaginative turns that this folk legend-inspired drama required if it had been animated.

Thankfully, Munjya’s acting isn’t quite as ridiculous as the plot. The titular creature is the main attraction, but Abhay Verma, who plays the young man fighting for his sanity, manages to stay in the background without taking center stage. In a movie where they don’t actually have much screen time, Mona Singh, Sharvari Wagh, and Suhas Joshi (as Bittu’s Ajji, a crucial piece in the Munjya history) are all more than suitable.

Munjya is the kind of movie that you want to be gone from your life just as much as Bittu does! It’s over before it even reaches the halfway point. It is evident that a lot of work has gone into creating it. It barely produces anything comparable.