The eponymous forest – it has been in existence since the 7th century, the audience is told in a rushed introduction – has a human voice. It emanates from a goddess carved in stone.
The rock deity has eyes that glow in the dark like traffic lights. Only those who dare to venture into the forbidden, mystical woods at night witness the phenomenon but only a few survive to tell the tale. It is deep-rooted fear of the unknown that keeps people away from the forest after sunset.
In the climax, a crowd divided by what they know or what they don’t congregates there. A protracted fracas erupts. The skirmish is of the sort that leaves one completely cold.
The Vvaan – Force of the Forest is the kind of film that starts off inoffensively but becomes increasingly difficult to digest as it wends its way to a denouement that is more confounding than anything that has gone before.
A prelude – a desperate king enters the forest at night to save his ailing pregnant wife – reveals in broad terms what lies hidden out there. It demands a willing suspension of disbelief. As the demand gets progressively worse, believing becomes impossible.
The cynicism is personified within the heart of the tale itself by a young man who is back in his ancestral village after a hiatus of six years. He sees no reason why he should buy into the myths circulating among the people.
Halfway through the film, the selfsame man intones: Abhi mujhe kuch samajh mein aa raha hain. Yes, it is only kuch that the character and the audience can grasp in a film like this.
The rest of the story is pure, eyeroll-inducing gobbledygook, albeit of a generally harmless kind. Matters turn weirder and weirder as the tale unfolds. As the protagonist grapples with conflicting emotions, none of us is any wiser.
That isn’t surprising at all. The writers themselves (Anandeshwar Dwivedi and Arunabh Kumar) are at sixes and sevens over the direction that they should guide the film towards. It is ‘bulldozer’ logic that is usually at play here. Literally so.
That piece of heavy machinery looms into view in two sequences. In an early sequence, a bulldozer malfunctions, goes berserk and endangers lives at a construction site.
The hero, an atheist engineer, brings the machine under control but not before it punctures a pipeline. Water sprays out and falls on a Shivling. A religious hymn plays on the soundtrack.
Much later in the film, another bulldozer appears, this time deep in the forest. It has been brought in by a man who wants the trees out of his way and not only because he is into timber smuggling.
Yes, there are many people in the film who want the forest destroyed but The Vvaan isn’t the kind of rooted-in-science environmental thriller that you would expect it to be.
It is too enamoured of the mythology that it builds around the temple in the forest and its hoary origins to spot the opportunity inherent in the – plot to elevate a mumbo jumbo-ridden drama to the level of a relevant cautionary tale about the sanctity of the natural world whether or not one believes that a divine power is watching over it.
Directed by Deepak Kumar Mishra and produced by TVF Motion Pictures and Balaji Telefilms Ltd, The Vvaan is a misguided missile that seems to question blind faith and superstition even as it whole-heartedly celebrates religious fervour and the power of prayer. It whimsically sways from one end to the other leaving yawning gaps in the process of transitioning.
The forest in The Vvaan is a site where an old-fashioned, mythology-heavy battle rages between good and evil, faith and scepticism, logic and gullibility. In depicting the cliched clash between tradition and modernity, the film, TVF’s first big-screen production, ties itself up in knots.
Confusion reigns supreme in the film as much as it does in the mind of the male protagonist, Rishi Kumar (Sidharth Malhotra). He is a construction company engineer pining for a child. He and his wife Mamta (Tamannaah Bhatia) cannot afford IVF, so the guy has applied for a loan that is stuck in red tape.
The couple and Rishi’s friend, vlogger Ved Prakash (Maniesh Paul), travel from Mumbai to a remote village in Bihar, Devanchal, for Chhath at the insistence of Rishi’s elder brother Shashi (Anup Soni).
That is where the forest stands and that is where Rishi must fight vested interests represented principally by an old pal Deepak (Sunil Grover), who wants to overrule everyone in the village and let the government cut down the trees to construct a road through the jungle.
His sister-in-law Sushila (Shweta Tiwari) bears a grudge against him over an unresolved family feud and a tragic accident they haven’t been able to live down.
The family has an elderly aunt (Sulabha Arya), who Ved Prakash believes is a witch out to suck the blood of unsuspecting men. The misunderstanding feeds a comic track. It is meant to provide some relief. All it does is aggravate things even further.
Sent into a tailspin, the film yo-yos between the awkwardly farcical and the laughably solemn. It is funny or meaningful at neither end of the spectrum.
The stick that Maniesh Paul gets is rough at both ends. He has no way of escaping the rough-hewn nature of his gags. The shadows, silhouettes and dire thoughts that haunt him are bunged in to enhance the humour quotient but to little avail.
Everybody else in the cast delivers earnest performances in half-baked roles. In the absence of any sort of scope of developing the characters into tangible, believable figures, the actors can do no more than swim with the meandering tide that the film largely is.
Why, oh why, would the people who gave us India’s first web series and then went on to deliver shows like Panchayat and Gullak think a foray into a deep and dark forest would yield dividends?
The Vvaan – Force of the Forest is a film lost in the woods. It never makes its way out.
