An Official Adaptation of the original Gujarati film Vash, Shaitaan follows the story of a family vacation gone awry after a stranger starts controlling the character of the daughter. Will they survive his demonic presence? The story here is powerful and it is because I had witnessed Vash prior to this, something that had added a new dimension to the regular horror flick by being more eerie with its atmosphere. Shaitaan is that too but slightly more on the sanitized side. The screenplay standing at well over 2 hours is engaging for most parts although I would have wished that the makers had absolutely gone bonkers with the original material in terms of its rawness which would have further enhanced the overall viewing experience. However, I wish to write more on its disappointing final scene(at the end of this section) which was a major deviation from the original source material. 

The drama opens with a scene of a dead rat being picked up from the wild, something that acts as a foreshadow later on in the film. This, before a demonic rise transpires amidst the rolling titles that sets a great precedence for the rest of the drama to follow. As a part of the world building, you are introduced to a family featuring the protagonist, his wife and their two children who collective plan for a family vacation in the forest. It is only along the way that they meet a stranger whose actions although friendly are even more stranger with the daughter who slowly starts to get controlled by him. The conflict in the drama is simple – for the protagonist to save his daughter and safeguard his family from the clutches of the devil. 

Now because I have watched Vash, I was also familiar with the beats of Shaitaan going into the film as well. If I were to treat Shaitaan as an independent film, yes it does work. But if I happen to compare it with Vash, it is a lesser product. In fact, it is more sanitized with its setting whereas Vash did go full throttle with the external factors. For instance, the house and the atmospherics play a significant part in the film Vash. The house is almost like a prison acting as an intimate form of an atmospheric horror, which like a pressure cooker keeps the tension in the drama intact. The rain is another very important factor that adds to the ambience in the drama. On both these accounts, Shaitaan falters while not quite being consistent with the utilization of these aspects in the drama. This is not to say that Shaitaan is not watchable, in fact it is engaging with multiple sequences being terrifying and well executed. But there are momentary lapses in between that squeeze the tension out of the drama which really could have been relentless. 

I would like to stress a bit on the events leading up to the final act. In Vash, although these set of events made sense, you could make out the budget contraints that limited the makers to create an extravagent demonic atmosphere, wherein the drama did feel curtailed(and a point that I did not mention in my review given the budget constraints in an industry that was trying something different). But here, Shaitaan does spread out that entire sequence in a rather impressive manner wherein you feel the building tension in the proceedings leading upto the end. But the makers falter at the finishing line in trying to do something different from the original! 

The issue was not in attempting something different but doing it for the sake of it which was a far cry from Vash wherein the protagonist wasn’t presented as a ‘Hero’ because whatever he chose to do, deep within he knew what he had lost. The ending here is so much more sanitized that presents the protagonist in a ‘Heroic’ act while the stakes in his life as compared to Vash are much lower with the ending that it chose to stick with. That for me was disappointing and kind of reduced to overall impact of Shaitaan in my eyes. But the screenplay still has plenty of engaging moments to keep you invested.