Jinn: Only a marketing gimmick can sell tickets

Jinn movie poster. Photo: Collected

Puja Cherry's latest film Jinn is an incredible feat of marketing intended to lure the audience to the cinema halls this Eid. Only when you are comfortably seated at the movie theatre and are two minutes into the movie, does the genius of the marketing campaign start to dawn on you. 

The plot is simple. Rafsan (played by Abdun Noor Shajal, who looks eerily similar to Ananta Jalil) gets worried by his wife's (played by the protagonist, Puja Cherry) strange "possessed" behaviour, which only occurs in the dead of the night.

And so Jinn begins, with Rafsan in hot pursuit of logic and explanation for his young 19-year-old newly-wed wife's condition. Rafsan miserably fails by the way (so does the viewer who would inevitably search for the reason that led her to voluntarily watch the movie) for the first half of the movie.   

Rafsan is joined by his friend Bijoy (played by Ziaul Roshan), a Dhaka University professor of psychology, and his assistant, a Boston University graduate shadowing Bijoy for her thesis work (in what, I am not sure though). Bijoy leads a life dedicated to proving that there are no "jinn" or spirits. When Bijoy and his assistant Tanuja appear on screen for the first time to debunk a "haunted" house, they faintly – and for the briefest moment – resemble a poor man's Lorraine and Ed Warren from The Conjuring. But it's a fleeting moment. Just like the first two minutes of the movie when it was fair game before all went down a ludicrous rabbit hole.  

At first, director Nader Chowdhury drags the audience by its feet through one too many comic reliefs, techno music (yes, you read that right), and even a Michael Jackson's thriller-inspired choreographed song to its underwhelming climatic point. Only then a combination of ridiculous subplots marred with even more ridiculous CGI and over-the-top acting inspire a nauseated feeling. 

For the egregious cherry on the cake, Jinn also has a poor man's Father Lankester Merrin from The Exorcist. Played by Mostafa Hira in his debut role, Elahi the exorcist conjures all sorts of tactics to expel the jinn. And at the end, leads everyone to a pentagram. 

See, the problem is, the juxtaposition of a bad script and a non-existent idea of "psycho-thriller" – the genre the Jinn team went with – puts you in a flux. Is this meant to be a campy take on horror or an earnest attempt at the genre but with zero skills in filmmaking and acting? I would bet it's the latter. 

A lot of the movie looks like something out of a commercial, and in the parts when it attempts to turn the mood sombre and invoke fear, it drags at first and then ultimately leaves the audience bored, at best, with its tired storytelling, or at worst, with its comical transitions, editing and CGI. 

Not that the actors had much substance to work with, given the mangled script masquerading as a "psycho-thriller," but they did their part by further butchering every little element of horror in the script with their over-the-top acting performances. I tried to "cool" down too as Elahi tells Rafsan in one instance during one of his many panicked moments seeing his wife suffer from a supernatural ailment – but to no avail. 

Jinn was a huge missed opportunity because this is an untapped genre in Bangladeshi cinema. There is a lot to explore, especially because of the religious card on the table. Jinn is a kindred subject matter in Islam and this is possibly the first locally-produced "psycho-thriller" to hit cinema halls in the country, at least in recent history. 

Also, because the marketing team did a great job to conjure false hope and very real hype with its Tk1 lakh challenge – it got moviegoers excited and lining up. 

And a little on the marketing gimmick. 

First, how incredibly dubious does the production company have to be to think a movie like Jinn would scare Bangladeshi moviegoers? Even if one were living under a rock and oblivious to any sort of horror or "psycho-thriller" literature, this childish filmmaking fails to even conjure one decent jump scare or speck in the plot to scare the audience – let alone not finish the movie. Perhaps it would be fitting to market it as a "Tk1 lakh challenge if you can sit through the cringe."

Second, nothing really amounted to the public challenge posted online by Jazz Multimedia, which produced Jinn. So far two "selected" individuals, reportedly, failed to watch the movie alone in a hall because it was that scary. And the latest 16 April media reports said four contestants were selected to watch it alone out of the 25,000 who "participated," meaning submitted the forms to be chosen for the challenge. I am one of the unchosen ones. 

For all intents and purposes, the film production company, Jazz Multimedia, would have run bankrupt within a matter of minutes had they actually held up their end of the deal. 

This was surely the easiest Tk1 lakh I have lost, along with the 2 hours and 13 minutes of my life I will never get back.