Not bad. Review on Saaya - Bollywood

Finally saw this movie after being recommended by a number of friends. I have not seen Dragonfly so it was my true first viewing of the movie :-)

Since I live in the US and do not watch cable TV, I had not seen any promos of the movie, so I pretty much went in uninitiated. To be very honest, I was not disappointed.

The plot of the movie may be found on other reviews on MS, and yes you have to stretch your belief system to trust most of it, but that is almost a requirement for watching any horror flick (e.g. The Sixth Sense, Signs etc.). I was looking for holes in the plot but only found a small one (more on it later), so that was fairly acceptable.

The acting was quite impressive. John Abraham impressed me in this one. I had hated 'Jism' and everyone associated with it, so this was a turnaround for him. Tara Sharma was OK. I found her fairly average looking but at least she was not the irritating type (take note Kareena, Preity). The supporting cast also acted competently.

The good thing about the movie was that it did not lose its focus throughout its running. There were no unnecessary side plots or comic relief to divert the attention and diminish the tension. I do not think that this is a true horror movie because even in the ghost scenes you know that the woman really loved her husband (and vice-versa) so she could not be trying to do him any harm.

I have to admit that I did not listen to most of the songs (thank God for the FF button), but since that did not take anything away from the overall story, I think they were put in purely for commercial purposes. Again, I am willing to give the director a pass on that because the end product was acceptable to me.

One plot-hole : Aakash tells the family of Maya that nobody called him 'Aki' except their daughter and that's how he trusted the children who came back from dead. However, in a later scene we see Tanya calling him 'Aki'.

So in conclusion, while this is no Mugal-E-Azam, it can be watched once without too much regret.