Ghost Stories Netflix Analysis

Ghost Stories

Directed By:

Zoya Akhtar

Anurag Kashyap

Dibakar Banerjee

Karan Johar

The most exciting part of Ghost Stories is the creative freedom that the makers get. The desaturated colors, the abstract narrative, the surrealism; could we have seen something like this had it been made for something other than Netflix?

Zoya Akhtar's Segment:

One can tell the story of this segment in one line and it would seem like an amateurish and a done-to-death story in horror. Any horror fan would have heard this kind of a story or a twist before. But what works in this segment is the pacing, it is difficult to judge on set if a particular shot of a person slowly walking towards the door will turn out to be scary or not in the edit. The tension building up towards the horror worked better than the revelation. Well, that's the beauty of horror, if the audience is convinced that the makers can scare them then they will be tensed at every silent shot in the film. There was one scene transition where a J-cut was used, which shouldn't have been used because that entirely took off the tension in me in the current shot. The characters seem real and there is an unpredictability building up all the time and the pay-off works.

Anurag Kashyap's Segment:

The best part of this segment is the writing. First, they establish a dynamic in a scene, a mother-son dynamic. In the next scene, there is a man saying, 'I hope he didn't disturb you' and she sends the kid to the man, now it is a neighbor who took care of the kid for sometime. In the next scene, the kid says, 'Will aunt love me if she has a kid?', now you know that she is his aunt and that she is pregnant. In the next scene, the kid hates the fact that she's pregnant and now the threat is the kid. In the next scene, we see the aunt talking to a lot of dolls and feeding them. Now is she the threat? With every scene, the dynamics of the film keep changing and this creates a lot of unpredictability which is crucial for horror to work. The surrealism and the abstract narrative works for being shocking and unsettling, but it fails to deliver a coherent narrative. That isn't a complaint because in spite of the narrative being abstract, the segment feels complete.

Dibakar Banerjee's Segment:

After having seen Birdbox, A Quiet Place and a lot of zombie movies, the rules of this world aren't exciting enough. But that's not the USP of this segment anyway. It is the underlying subtexts that the film talks about. It explores a lot of themes but does having those subtexts forgive, not so good writing on the physical level? Maybe. In this segment, the writing without the subtexts is decent. There is a constant tension and a change of state throughout. The closure is given for the conflict in the subtext by bringing in something new, Gulshan Devaiah, on the physical level which won't work for someone who didn't follow the subtexts. It's refreshing to see this kind of a narrative. The beginning of this segment has the ambiance of the environment louder than the dialogue, giving us a taste of the beautiful landscapes only to ruin it soon. They've shot most of it handheld and by using natural lighting, which grounds the world by making it more realistic and suddenly when there's a supernatural element in it, it gets exciting.

Karan Johar's Segment:

The opening few minutes of this segment makes you recheck the title of the film. But then, we wait to see if Karan had tried some kind of a horror that we haven't seen before. A horror set in a Dharma world. Had that worked, that would have been a masterpiece in horror. But sadly, it didn't. Thriller is something that makes the audience scared for the characters and horror is something that makes the audience scared for themselves. For the audience to feel that tension build up, they have to see something that they feel threatened by. In Zoya's segment that was the old woman, in Anurag's and Dibakar's segment that was a lot of things, but here there's nothing established of that sort. The scene where the woman is encountered by her in-laws at night, is scary but it doesn't feel in place. The whole setting of this segment didn't work, but that's a risk that the film maker took for which he shouldn't get flak for.