Bali review: An interesting idea squandered by fairly generic storytelling

Vishal Furia's debut directorial venture Lapachhapi (2017), which he recently remade in Hindi as Chhorii (2021), was set in a small house in the middle of nowhere. Furia had intelligently used the setting of a rural landscape and sugarcane fields to evoke a sense of claustrophobia and eeriness. In Bali, his second Marathi feature film, Furia takes us into a hospital where young children are dying mysteriously.

A half-built and abandoned building, now dilapidated, a permanently locked room, and an unknown disfigured woman named Elizabeth who only appears before children... one couldn't ask for a better setting for a horror film. But this time Furia fails to use the setting to his advantage. Somehow, he seems unwilling or unable to use it to evoke that same sense of claustrophobia.

When seven-year-old Mandar Sathe (Samarth Jadhav) suddenly passes out while playing cricket, his middle-class widowed father Shrikant (Swwapnil Joshi) takes him to Jansanjivani hospital for further tests on the advice of his family doctor. Mandar seems to be fine, but as a precautionary measure, Dr Radhika Shenoy (Pooja Sawant) decides to admit him till the test results arrive. In his brief stay, Mandar befriends a creepy boy named Bhaskar and suddenly his health worsens. Soon enough, a strange woman starts calling him.

A hospital is like a gold mine for makers of horror films. The morgues, the outpatient departments, the operation theatres plus the maze-like corridors provide innumerable possibilities to create a really scary yet realistic film that can stay with you for long. But Bali doesn’t manage so much as one decent scare, largely because Furia is more focused on showing us the undying love of father and son. The film spends a lot of time, nearly 40 minutes, getting the viewer used to the father-son bonding, which is a lot in a film with a runtime of 105 minutes.

The film does try to create a sense of mystery about whether Elizabeth exists or is just a figment of the imagination of these children who are under heavy medication, but that mystery is resolved by the observant viewer pretty soon. Thereafter the screenplay loses its grip and starts ambling towards the climax. Now the only thing left is to figure out why Elizabeth does what she does.

And that is the only reason we care to watch the film till the climax because, of course, the ending will explain everything. But the climactic twist comes out of nowhere, giving viewers no clues to put the pieces together.

The screenplay by Furia and Swapnila Gupta is full of familiar traits that are neither suspenseful nor believable. The film also tries to comment on the commercialization of the medical profession, but the storytelling lacks the depth required to explore the subject properly.

Swwapnil Joshi tries hard to shed his stardom and inhabit the struggles of a father whose son is in hospital. To an extent, he manages to convey the frustration of a helpless man who is worried sick about his child but is also attempting to piece together the mystery of Elizabeth. His sincerity is laudable, but when it comes to showing the vulnerability of his character, especially during his conversations with his son, he tends to falter.

Child artiste Samarth Jadhav's performance leaves a lot to be desired. Pooja Sawant, who starred in Lapachhapi, has limited screen time this time but gives of her best to make her character believable. The problem, however, is that her Dr Radhika Shenoy just comes and goes. We never get to know her well. It is also one reason why the climactic twist does not hit the viewer as hard as it should have. Because you hardly know these characters to feel anything for them.

Surprisingly, Bali is also disappointing in the technical departments, especially the cinematography and background score. Unlike Lapachhapi, where Furia had used some creative methods to keep the audience interested because it was mostly shot in a single house, here he seems to have gone for a more generic approach. The camera mostly remains static and there are hardly any innovative shots. Even the background score is not scary enough.

If a 'horror' film fails to scare the viewer even once during its 105 minutes, even when he is watching it alone at midnight with the lights off, then there are only two possibilities: 1) The viewer is a really brave person who doesn't get scared easily. 2) The film is not scary at all.

Since the viewer in question was me, I can say with reasonable confidence that the second possibility is more likely.

Bali is being streamed on Amazon Prime Video.