Gaslight Review: Sara Ali Khan’s OTT Film Works Better in Theory Than in Execution

Director: Pavan Kirpalani
Writers: Pavan Kirpalani, Neha Sharma
Cast: Sara Ali Khan, Vikrant Massey, Chitrangda Singh, Akshay Oberoi, Rahul Dev

A wheelchair-bound princess returns to her ancestral home in Gujarat. Years after her mother’s death, a grown-up Meesha (Sara Ali Khan) is back to make amends with her estranged father, Ratan Sinh, the King of Mayagarh. Age seems to have softened her. But Meesha is instead welcomed by Rukmani (Chitrangda Singh), her saucy stepmother and the woman she blames for wrecking her family. Rukmani claims that Ratan is away on a business trip and unreachable by phone. As Meesha waits to meet the man she once adored, she starts to see strange happenings in the palace every night. Something is not right; she suspects her father is actually dead. Her paranoia has everyone rolling their eyes except Kapil (Vikrant Massey), the loyal estate manager. Together, Meesha and Kapil plan to get to the bottom of this conspiracy. Other character vignettes emerge: A seedy cousin (Akshay Oberoi), a doctor (Shishir Sharma), a top cop (Rahul Dev), a dog named Commander. The plot thickens and thins. 

The title, not unlike the 1944 Ingrid Bergman-starring thriller of the same name, explains much of the film’s genre identity. A young and traumatised woman believes she is being manipulated by others. She is convinced that her shaky mental state is being exploited. (For those who’ve watched the 2005 Jodie Foster-starring Flight Plan, Meesha’s defiant journey – and her alleged descent into madness – might look a bit familiar.) She questions her own powers of reasoning once nobody else finds evidence of her sightings in the spooky palace. As the title suggests, the film is fairly open about the fact that Meesha is indeed being gaslit. A lot of what she sees isn’t afraid to look staged, so the conceit is not about whether she’s sane; it’s more about who is behind the amateur scares and why. 

The movie spends a little too long on the suspense-building at night, but it’s also a clever way of implying that horror film-making is essentially a language of gaslighting the audience. The tools it uses – jump scares, sound cues, visual effects, silences, eerie atmospherics – are mostly red herrings to manipulate viewers away from the truth. The climactic twist is then the narrative’s way of feeding on our disorientation and trust issues. So in a sense, Gaslight nails the subtext of psychological horror. It reveals the spiritual symmetry between the story and its storytelling. The stretched tension of her experiences is crafted to trick both the protagonist and her audience by pitting us against our self-awareness. She, like us, can see the strings; that’s the grammar of gaslighting.

Given director’s Pavan Kirpalani’s credentials – his Phobia (2016) is possibly the best of its kind in the last decade of Hindi cinema – the subversion is fitting. Even the setting makes sense. Centering the premise around a dysfunctional ‘royal family’ – whose blue-blooded secrets and feuds are shaped by their fading relevance in modern society – is not just a physical device (because let’s face it, a haunted palace is too convenient). It’s a canny way of exploring themes of class rage and genetic privilege. For instance, the characters of Kapil and Rukmani are interesting, because both seem to be outsiders on opposite ends of the spectrum. Rukmani is a queen by virtue of marrying a king, but other members treat her like a gold-digging fraud. Kapil in turn is treated as a servant by Rukmani, but he remains faithful to the family for funding his education and saving him from a life of crime. More than once, he is mortified to be seen sitting on the same table, conversing at the same level or sharing a drink with Meesha. The old-school Bollywood taunts of aristocrats reminding their employees of ‘aukat’ (status) aren’t out of place here. His stature basically reflects the gaslighting that’s inherent to the systems of social prejudice; Kapil, like many others, has been slowly conditioned into a state of both obligation and resentment. There’s also the case of modern royals gaslighting themselves into assuming that they still matter; their borrowed lifestyle – polo, skeet-shooting, lavish balls, single malts – presents the perfect environment for cloak-and-dagger horror. 

After writing about the film’s merits for so long, I almost feel guilty for bursting the bubble now. But the hard truth is that Gaslight works better in theory. The lazy way to put it would be: The ideas are there and the execution is not. As a movie, as a viewing experience, it isn’t all that smooth. The deeper problem with Gaslight, though, is that it falls prey to its own genre trappings – it is derailed by its own paranoia of being too simple and visible. The twist arrives with around twenty minutes to go – it’s predictable, sure, but it’s also necessary because of the film’s thematic slants. At this point, Gaslight becomes more of a sociological thriller than the horror movie it was disguised as. But then there’s a silly and gimmicky counter-twist, a last-ditch effort to keep the film ahead of those who’re watching it. Like several Hindi horror vehicles lately, you can sense that this one is too conscious of its relationship with the audience. It’s almost like the only priority is to hoodwink us.

By second-guessing (or, well, gaslighting) itself this way, the story ends up sabotaging its own sense of reasoning and logic. It casts aspersions over the performances and the performances within performances, too, which until then were adequate enough. Suddenly, you wonder why Sara Ali Khan played Meesha a certain way – an anti-Atrangi Re of sorts – all along. You wonder what her role was explained as, and how she might have (mis)interpreted it. You also wonder why Vikrant Massey seems to be playing the same man in different shades. (The list is endless: Haseen Dillruba, Forensic, Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitaare, Lipstick Under My Burkha, Love Hostel). Perhaps Chitrangda Singh is the only one who comes out of this looking layered, but that’s down to the writing of her character rather than her acting. 

In short, it feels like Gaslight becomes a victim of its own title. The final revelation gets clunky in its pursuit to keep us confused about whether the film is super-naturally or naturally inclined. It made me sad, really, because for a while it was a rare film that read uncertainty as a function of fear. There was a chance to show that horror need not be manufactured these days; it’s all around us, in broad daylight, in the way entitled classes lose touch with the world, and in the way disenfranchised people react to the vagaries of fate. But Gaslight remembers its medium – it remembers that it would rather be oversmart than smart – and hence deduces that viewers would rather be surprised than systematically shocked. That, in a nutshell, is the tragedy of both commercial Hindi cinema and the nation it occupies: Short-term gratification, not long-term reckoning.