Ra Movie Review - Logical Scares

Bharath Vijayakumar

Fear and exploration of the unknown is almost always fascinating. When you try to reason out the facts and come up with reasonable justifications the impact is even more. When you do this fear might take a backseat. But credibility would win over. Ra precisely tries to do this.

Plot:

Natural deaths under mysterious circumstances keep happening in the hero’s household.  The hero has some paranormal experiences around this time. Is there a connection between these two?

Direction:

Ra sucks you in quite early on. The first half has some genuine scary moments. The eerie ambience and underplay of music do the trick. Another notable aspect is that these moments are neither rushed in nor packed very close together. The makers had said that the film is a genre bender. The second half which reveals this is a mixed bag. The final few minutes that brings in a third person as a link to the earlier deaths hangs a little loose. You do not expect a typical bad guy with henchmen around him to just barge inside a movie like this.  A thriller always loses a portion of the sheen when an undisclosed character makes his/her entry very late on to untie the knots. Look at the best thrillers around and you will realize that the culprit was always in your vicinity.

Fear takes a backseat as the movie progresses. This is because we are following Ra through it’s hero and he plays someone who does not get scared but is rather intent on finding out the reason behind every incident. The concepts of fourth dimension and travelling of the soul into this space are a close parallel to *Insidious. These scenes definitely show the intent of the makers to provide something new and with reasonable amount of reasoning. But along the way as the fear quotient comes down, the interest quotient does not really step up in an equal measure.  Another major reason for the decline in the fear factor is that it is actually not the hero alone who is in trouble but the entire earth as such and we have all along followed the movie from the hero’s perspective.

Bottomline:

Ra does offer a unique experience with concepts of demon, fourth dimension, doomsday and what not. We only wish the genre bending that the makers have tried out was more seamless.

Rating:2.75