Panchak (2024) :
Movie Review -
Madhuri Dixit produces a Marathi-language comedy drama, Panchak, directed by Rahul Awate and Jayant Jathar. Panchak is a multistarrer, which is a good trend in Marathi cinema, especially with family comedies. Mapuskar showed what one can do with an ensemble cast in "Ventilator" (2016) and somehow set a trend to be followed by others. Panchak is in a similar zone as far as the cast and chaos are concerned, but otherwise, it's a totally different film with a completely different topic. It's nothing unique but the same old superstition vs. Science tale that I can easily recall from several movies, but here it is not sensitively handled. There are reasons for it, and one of them is the idea of making it a comedy. The other reasons are poor scripting of events that are "rubbish," as the character says. It's over-fantasised and over-horrified, too. The problematic merger of four different types of context: comedy, drama, horror, and fantasy, makes it a feeble attempt at a serious topic. To add something positive for the ancestors' sake, I'd say it did not bore me at all. I mean, it's not that bad; it's decent.
Set in a traditional village, Panchak revolves around a family that has recently experienced the death of a senior member of the family. The dead person had donated his body to a medical college for a good reason, which puts his family members in an awkward position of not getting to do any funeral or last rites. Based on the exact time of death, the village priest reveals that the family has been cursed with "Panchak." That means five more possible deaths in the family and close relatives within a year. The fear of Panchak shocks the family members, and they are scattered into pieces with their own fantasies. One of them is a doctor, and one is a scientist. The rest of the members blindly believe in this superstitious curse and start living with the fear of death. Amidst the arguments, a couple of accidents make things more unfortunate for the lead protagonist, who wants his family members not to believe any such superstitions. At last, he had to choose a path of superstition to beat superstition, and that's what forms the rest of the narrative here.
Rahul and Jayant's basic idea was certainly nice, but they couldn't explore it. They just couldn't mix it up well with humour. The first 15 minutes of the film had a death scene but not for a minute, not even for a bit I felt like watching a "house with a death." Forget humour, forget comedy, and forget drama; first, you have to convince me that someone has actually died in the house. Not a single member behaved like someone close to them had died in that scene. The film lost me in the first 15 minutes, never to win me back again. You can't joke about somebody's death or make any random speeches at the final darshan. That's too much and extremely against the humour you want to create. And where was this humour, this fun, by the way? I didn't even find 5 scenes to laugh at. The comedy really fell flat, and so did the humor. It's funny because they were destroying so many good scenes for the humorous comedy, and at the end, the comedy died. Anyway, there are some moments that make you think about the topic. I mean, it's goddamn true in many rural areas, and there is no cure for it. In some parts, the situation is more horrible. Panchak could have made it a social drama, but it was stuck with a certain family that didn't deserve it. The overuse of horror elements, loud background score, unnecessary chaotic hysterical, hallucinations, and fantasies have killed the entire fun, and no crow would come for its tenth-day rituals.
Adinath Kothare plays a sensible character here, but there are limits to it. He does a fine job, though. It's just that the character isn't aggressive enough. Tejshree Pradhan, who plays his love interest, is another well-educated character, but screen time is limited for her as well. Nandita Patkar shows her class again, even though her character is unlikeable and too hysterical. Anand Ingale and Satish Alekar's lazy performances took my interest away in the first 15 minutes, but after a while, they came back to normal. Dilip Prabhavalkar and Bharti Acharekar's supporting roles are casually good. I don't know why, but I couldn't have imagined any other Marathi cinema actress playing a Gujarati girl, and Deepti Devi proved me right. Sagar Talashikar, Sampada Kulkarni, Ashish Kulkarni, Vidyadhar Joshi, Ganesh Mayekar, and Aarti Wadagbalkar have done decent work in their roles.
Panchak has situational music, but that didn't help much, I guess. "Bha bhaa bhi bhee.." started sounding good after the show was over. Pooja Gupte's cinematography was okay, while Jayant Jathar's editing could have easily trimmed 10 more minutes from the film. The film lacked a vision that could have made it more entertaining and powerful. You can't use opera tunes to make comic scenes. Never in my life have I imagined Vad Jau Kunala Sharan being used for a comedy as well as a haunting scene. I am afraid that the very beautiful and kind soul of Balgandharva is likely to haunt some people now. A normal chase sequence can't be dragged for 5 minutes. There is no sense in creating comedy out of dead conflicts. If your efforts to create that and the outcome of what you have created don't deliver enough, then why waste time on it? Rahul Awate and Jayant Jathar should have given it some thought before finalising things, and then, I guess, maybe we would have gotten a better product. For now, it's a decent flick, but it's a mess for sure.
RATING - 4/10*
