It won’t be wrong for me to say that the faltering premise of Chhorii 2 was a lot better than the rest of the film. This doesn’t say much because the moment its central conflict is inflicted, the drama here literally enters a passage of a string of uneventfulness wherein nothing really happens apart from characters running around in confined corridors (and more on that later). When you are first reintroduced to Sakshi (Nushrratt Bharuccha), seven years have already passed from the events of the last film. She is now a school teacher and a mother to a 7 year old girl Ishani (Hardika Sharma) who suffers from skin sensitivity from sunlight. This may seem like a prominent allegory for the film, but it does feel a lot hollow when you see it add up at a later point in the film. The same is true for the lesson of the ‘Caveman’ that Sakshi is shown to be teaching her students. What felt like integral plot-points at the beginning, never quite came together in the folklore.

One of the most weird incidents transpire in the very first act, when you are introduced to Inspector Samar (Gashmeer Mahajani). In an odd turn of events, you see a quick recap veiled as a flashback being narrated by Samar (and not Sakshi), who has allowed Sakshi and her daughter (and Rani their househelp) stay for 7 years in his apartment. Anyone would find this little detail creepy, but Samar is a knight in the shining armour, and drastically different to Sakshi’s thought to be dead but still alive husband Rajbir (Saurabh Goyal). The twist in the tale occurs when a charred facial cut-out of a character appearing in order to lure and kidnap Ishani, while her mother is away. And this marks the point when the film completely becomes tasteless.

There is a drastic shift in the tone that keeps oscillating between a jump-scare horror and an atnospheric horror. Remember the setting of the fields from the first Chhorii, a critical detail that added to the gloomy atnospherics of the drama? The same is replaced by underground wells with corridors straight out of The Dark Knight Rises (2012), only way flatter with the framing and less intimidating. The setting houses a cult group looking to pay their tributes to a ‘Pradhan’ (Supreme Leader) wherein they need a girl from their bloodline to ‘sacrifice’ herself to the divine. What ought to have been a chilling tale of folklore, instead turns into a meandering tale of characters simply running around without much ado, and barely colliding parts.

Something that the sequel deviated from was its protagonist Sakshi, who had so little to do after a point than running around in search of her daughter. In fact, it was the other character of Daasi (Soha Ali Khan), a witch conflicted with her own moralities that wished to give some direction to this frustrating tale. Her folklore and interactions with Ishani did hold some amount of intrigue, but largely was cut-short by the unfocused structure of the screenplay, wanting to give importance to the characters of Sakshi, Rajbir and Samar. Both Rajbir and Samar remained such sketchy characters on opposite ends of the spectrum of morality, that they literally came across as incompetent. Rajbir made countless unsuccessful tries to kill Sakshi, and Samar was literally an incompetent cop seemingly pausing the action for a moment, going on a holiday, returning and resuming an action set-piece that is divided over minutes in the film (and that felt like days while watching it). Literally, neither does the folklore make a splash neither do the characters, all of whom are just shrieking with multiple soulless ‘extras’ in the claustrophobic corridors.

If Chhori 2 was a test match, it would account for its characters playing for a draw by dead-batting and fire-walling any half volley that would come their way. If Chhorii 2 were a reel, I would probably for switched off my phone after leaving it halfway. If Chhorii 2 were a corporate employee, he would have opted for a sabbatical after knowing his fate in his appraisals. In other words, Chhorii 2 is always a losing battle even as it tries to build its atmospherics in the most pale way possible. This sentiment extends even to its final act that didn’t necessarily get the message of feminism across effectively. The film is so emotionally hollow that I am literally out of phrases on what the makers were going for at the end. Neither the mother-daughter bond nor the daughter-witch bond or the viewer-film bond was successful in being established with the film ending abruptly at the end. And that quite accurately summed up a painstaking screenplay that was devoid of creativity and completely bankrupt of new ideas, while wanting to impart a social-message that didn’t make it through. Tch tch…