T's a peculiar attempt, this 1920. Shooting in Yorkshire - and passing a castle there as just a hansom-cab ride away from Mumbai - the film clearly desires to replicate classic British period chillers. The man wears a three-piece suit, the woman is in modern-day approximations of what the art director mistakes for being Victorian, and they look more the exiled Baron and Baroness instead of the Thakur-Thakrain.
It is as if director Vikram Bhatt - who made watchable films a decade ago, we hear - wanted to create a stulted period atmosphere just to show other horror-makers that his work is, indeed, different. Unlike the Ramsays, his is a mansion, not a haveli. Unlike Ram Gopal Varma, his film relies on footsteps in silence, not sound-design boos. And with scratchy gramophones and the use of western classical music, he seems to be trying to show us how international his film is, how classy.
