Ooru Peru Bhairavakona Review: A Folklore-Inspired Fantasy That Leaves A Lot To Be Desired

Writer and Director: VI Anand

Cast: Sundeep Kishan, Kavya Thapar, Varsha Bollamma, Ravi Shankar, Vennela Kishore, Harsha Chemudu

Runtime: 136 minutes

Available in: Theatres

Do you know the feeling of watching a film, being engaged by it for the most part but still not feeling completely satisfied because you can clearly sense that the film had a lot more potential than it ended up tapping? I had a similar feeling while walking out of Ooru Peru Bhairavakona. All the elements are right there. A fascinating idea, an emotional backstory, some amusing ideas, and a tight screenplay that neatly houses all these elements. Yet, the film feels like a concise version of an expansive fantasy novel. The world and the myth around it deserved stronger and deeper exploration, instead of being simplified into bullet-point-like scenes or exposition-heavy monologues. While the film has some fun to offer, the idea at its center warrants a much edgier and more ambitious storytelling. We often see bloated films that have little to say but Bhairavkona’s predicament is the opposite: it has a lot of material to explore but sticks to basic treatment.

By basic treatment, I don’t mean Bhairavakona is a low-effort film. Running at around 130 minutes, the film barely gives you time to breathe as it's packed with story. We are introduced to Basava (Sundeep Kishan) as a jewel thief at a wedding. This feels like a standard intro but we later learn that this burglary is central to the story. The screenplay is very well-rounded in a way it connects the jewels with the characters, their past, the conflict, and the eventual resolution. But the genericness also seeps into the treatment at times. For instance, in the finale, Basava has to take on ghosts with a magical wand but the entire sequence plays out like a run-of-the-mill fight scene we have seen a gazillion times in the past. Even the ghosts, behaving like zombies, attack our hero one after the other instead of ambushing him, just like the guys in the villain’s gang do. As a result, not only are we robbed of the chance to witness something new, but it comes across as unimaginative because the scene treats an abnormal scenario like an utterly generic scene sans any thrill or amusement.

When Basava, his friend Jhonny (Harsha Chemudu), and another thief named Geetha (Kavya Thapar) enter a village named Bhairavakona while evading police, nothing seems to be normal in this mysterious place. Even the cold opening, in which a man’s attempts to escape the village are thwarted, leading to a violent punishment of being tortured by a frog, piques our intrigue by teasing this weird, eerie world and its secrets. After a great interval twist, the back story of the village, its connection to mythology, and its dark secrets are revealed through a monologue, and the film doesn’t back on the myth or the magic of this place after that point. When the focus shifts to Bhoomi and Basava’s love story, the direction the film is trying to go in becomes pretty obvious. And moreover, when ‘perspective’ is the antagonist of this love story and ‘truth’ is the resolution, making the audience privy to this mistaken perspective before the actual truth is presented would have lent more gravitas to the emotion of the love story. The way this love story is dealt with is quite generic and feels like a wasted opportunity to actually play with perspectives and create some meaty drama.

That being said, a sequence in the second half where Basava and his gang have to cheat a gang of ghosts to procure their jewels is so absurd as an idea that the play is funny. Vennela Kishore as Dr Narappa, a women-hater gets one of his better roles in the recent past. The reveal about his character is quite amusing and I wish the film was filled with more such ideas, especially because the mystical nature of the film and its world is a playground for such amusements. While logic has no place in Bhairavakona, I genuinely wish some aspects were answered more clearly or explored well. Why is Dr Narappa dropping references to ‘Komuram Bheemudo’ from RRR (2022)? How is he even aware of it? Why are even ghosts behaving like humans? So on and so forth. In a rush to wrap up the story, the film just acknowledges folklore, Garuda Puranam, its missing pages, and the concept of the afterlife, but doesn’t explore them, making it a missed opportunity to craft a genuine folklore-based supernatural adventure. Despite its shallowness, Ooru Peru Bhairavakona is still an engaging watch because the screenplay is packed with interesting events but one can only think of the unutilised potential of this world and the many cool, creepy, inventive directions the story could have gone in.

Watch the Official Trailer of Ooru Peru Bhairavakona