Ek Thi Daayaan Movie Review: The Curse of Second Half.

Ek Thi Daayaan is the directorial debut of Kannan Iyer and if you are like me who like to sit till the end of credits, you must have noticed his name on notable films like Bandit Queen, Daud and also the less said the better Harman Baweja Starrer Victory. Ek Thi Daayaan is adapted from a short story written by Mukul Sharma. Unfortunately I have not read it, which may be good to some extent as I was not comparing what I have read earlier to what happens on screen.

The movie begins with Bobo (Emraan Hashmi) getting distracted by some visions while performing a  magic show, resulting in a minor accident. Further to this we discover Bobo and his girlfriend are living together for past one year. They plan to adopt a child and if you are wondering why they are thinking of adoption when marriage is not on their cards, the only reason for this is that the script needs a child in the climax.

Soon we discover what happened with young Bobo in the past and how he lost his sister and father supposedly to a daayaan ( witch).Now this covers major part of the movie, where you laugh and get goosebumps in equal measure, when was the last time when you saw children in Hindi Cinema behave normally. But the fun is over with culmination of first half.

Second half begins with two unnecessary songs, in fact none of the songs in the movie serve any purpose. Then a hurried climax and a set which looks similar to Raaz 3 is thrown in. While Salman beats hundreds of people in his movies, Emraan goes further ahead and seems to battle and kill the evil force and save mankind from doomsday.

Out of the 3 leading Ladies, Konkona Sen Sharma has more scope to perform and she does not disappoint us. And yes please stop casting Kalki as a firang. She is like the new female Bob Christo of Bollywood. Humaseriously needs to lose her weight, the close –ups of her face frightened me 

Pawan Malhotra in the role of a widower and father of two kids is a delight to watch, we need to see more of him on screen.

Kannan Iyer definitely runs the show in the first half that is capable of telling a story without resorting to usual horror movie gimmick  and makes a mark, but alas the same cannot be said about second half of the movie. It seems like first half was made by one director and second half by other director.  Editing by Sreekar Prasad is top notch, but he also cannot salvage the second half and especially the climax.

It would be interesting to watch if the director would have delved into more grey shades of character, instead of resorting to it in just one line in end, when Bobo says to Zubin that evil and good resides within us, it is for us to decide what we want to be. Yet this important metamorphosis of Bobo is done in 30 seconds of the film.

Emraan Hashmi at what he does best 

Emraan Hashmi is a  delight to watch on screen, check out for the scene when the camera zooms into his face after first performance where he knows something has went wrong, the split second on scene where he shows his vulnerability and his fear. The second scene is when Tamara meets with an accident, where normally Hindi film heroes cry out loud or shout or tears start following, Emraan does not do any of this histrionics, it’s just his eyes which do talking and conveying us his fear and anger at himself for not preventing the incident. How many Bollywood stars these days would be happy to do a film, where they are hardly present in first half of the film, and where the female lead has equal role to play with with the male lead.
Ek Thi Daayaan could have been a much much better film, but the curse of second half of Indian Cinema haunts the film. Though I am against film censorship, I fail to understand why this movie has been given U/A certificate which means children below 12 can watch with parents, which I feel is not a good idea considering the subject and impressionable age of children below 15.

Since when did Kingdom of Dreams shifted to Gurgaon from Mumbai?  Oh! and by the way you can even spot Kannan Iyer in the film, he is the guy who is giving lecture to students on Lunar Eclipse towards the climax. One more Trivia Tip by Souvik Gupta The original short story is written by Mukul Sharma, who happens to be Father of Konkona Sen Sharma. Mukul had acted opposite Rakhee Gulzar in Paroma (Bengali Film) which was Directed by Aparna Sen.