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Boomika Review - An engaging film with interesting ideas but lacks the high moments!

PUBLISHED DATE : 23/Aug/2021

Boomika Review - An engaging film with interesting ideas but lacks the high moments!

Boomika - An engaging film with interesting ideas but lacks the high moments!
Bharath Vijayakumar
We have had horror films where technology is used as a medium for spirits to communicate. Yaavarum Nalam (Tamil) and the recent Malayalam films Chathur Mukham and Cold Case come to mind. There have also been films like Eeram (Tamil), wherein a natural resource like water played the 'ghost'. Boomika explores something very interesting. What if nature itself turned ghost? Or to rephrase it more appropriately, what if humans are the evil and nature has to get rid of them.
 
A group of people enter a reserved forest area to develop a long abandoned site. But they soon start experiencing something paranormal. Boomika runs for about 2 hours and Rathindran Prasad keeps us invested for the most part. Despite its issues, Boomika is one the better films to come out in the horror/thriller space of Tamil cinema in recent memory (of course the bar is set very low with memories of films like Penguin and Silence/Nishabdham scaring us more than any scene from those films). For starters, the characters in this film behave or react like normal people, a far cry from what we usually get. Once they sense something paranormal, the characters decide to move out immediately. How often have we seen something as basic as this in a horror film. Only one character (Aditi) does something stupid but even that has a justification with that character being paranoid. The jump scares are kept to a minimum but there is a certain tension and anticipation in how these scenes are staged.

The film turns into a message movie in its final leg. The flashback is again pretty good. The message is sort of on your face but surprisingly the narration is subtle without melodrama. The film would have probably been better without dialogues explicitly carrying out the message of the film. The Boomika character playing out as a metaphor for nature might have sufficed. But the film prefers to shoehorn this fact in its final leg. A special mention about the cinematography. This is a very well shot film.

Bottomline
Given the low bar set by films recently in the horror/thriller space, Boomika certainly does a lot better. The ideas are interesting, the narration is subtle and the film is engaging for the most part. What it lacks are the high moments.

Rating: 2.75/5

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