Chhorii Review: Scares Get Lost in the Sugarcane Maze
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Pursued by dangerous loan sharks, a businessman and his wife, Sakshi, an eight-months-pregnant woman, are forced to take shelter with their driver’s family in a house hidden amidst massive sugarcane fields. As eerie occurrences begin to unfold, Sakshi finds her life threatened by supernatural forces.
Directed by Vishal Furia, the Bollywood horror film Chhorii stars Nushrratt Bharuccha as protagonist Sakshi, a city girl working at an NGO, while Saurabh Goyal plays her husband, Hemant. On the run from loan sharks, Sakshi finds herself in the care of her driver’s wife, Devi (Mita Vashisht), while Hemant is away, trying to manage their financial troubles. Caring at first, the orthodox Devi starts to behave strangely after Sakshi reports seeing little boys playing hide-and-seek around the house. Soon, Sakshi grows suspicious that Devi may have nefarious ulterior motives for offering her refuge.
The endless sugarcane fields and the secluded village house where Devi lives serve as an eerie backdrop for Chhorii. However, the film takes a long time to reach its primary conflict, and until then, the spooky scenes and jump scares fail to deliver any real fear. You see a couple of ghostly kids running around, and funnily, Sakshi doesn’t find anything odd about them.
Mita Vashisht is intimidatingly creepy as Devi, a woman from the heartland with regressive beliefs -including the notion that a girl child is a curse for an expectant mother. Sakshi, a progressive, modern woman, rejects these outdated beliefs. So when she witnesses Devi’s cruel treatment of her daughter-in-law, it serves as the first red flag that something is off about the older woman. As haunting lullabies echo and visions of a charred woman plague her, Sakshi grows desperate to uncover the dark secrets Devi is hiding. But while the revelations are disturbing, the plot’s trajectory becomes disappointingly predictable.
Chhorii attempts to explore themes of female infanticide, superstitions, and patriarchy through its eerie tale of a pregnant woman trapped in a sugarcane field. However, its execution is slow, sloppy, and exhausting. If you view it as a thriller, the pacing is too sluggish; if you treat it as a horror flick, the scares are too weak. An intriguing premise is buried under poor execution, but perhaps it might serve as a decent one-time watch if you keep your expectations low.
Watch the film Prime Video.
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