REVIEW AFFRAA TAFFRI (Gujarati)

Producers- Chandulal Patel, Hiten Shah, Mukesh Thakkar and Ashish Gala

Director- Viral Rao

Star Cast- Khushi Shah, Harshil, Smit Pandya, Mitra Gadhvi, Chetan Daiya and Shekhar Shukla

Genre- Social

Rating- **

HALF BAKED AND CONTRIVED!

Jyothi Venkatesh

Affraa Taffri revolves around a village called Vishrampur where the local leader Trikamdas pretends to be dying and asks his kith and kin to fulfill his last wish of seeing his granddaughter Jwala get married. The girl however has no wish to get married soon. What follows is a merry go round scenario which culminates in an eerie atmosphere in a dilapidated and ghost infested with a blend of supernatural and vendetta story.

The film is a silly and contrived comedy drama with some spooky effects. The tacky film abounds with funny and inane dialogues which make you literally squirm on your seat. The movie launches RJ Harshil Shah as an actor, while Mitra Gadhvi and Chetan Daiya prove themselves adept in their characters. What catches your attention is Khushi Shah’s performance as a ghost and her realistic make up! Khushi is good in a dual role and shows that she is capable of delineating her roles with élan. Ragi Jani and Prashant Barot justify their characters, with effortless ease. Shekar Shukla sets out to make his role rise above the script with his brilliant improvisations

Though the plot begins on an interesting plot with a doctor being literally picked up from his nuptial bed on the very first night of his wedding, the premise fails to live up to its novelty and gradually starts dipping in its pace and emerges as a boring verbose drama devoid of novelty, The worst part is that Viral Rao seems to be unaware whether he is making an attempt to weave a comedy or a horror tale.

Viral Rao is handicapped by his own half baked script as a writer which fails to do justice to what it sets out to begin and ends up as neither a comedy nor a horror film. The biggest problem with the film is that it has far too many actors  who only end up spoiling the broth and the dialogue delivery also is too loud, contrived and over dramatic and fails to whet your appetite and at a time when one is glad that here are quite a few young Gujarati filmmakers who are making an attempt to come up with relatively newer subjects and set out to experiment at the box office, a film like Affra Taffri arrives on the horizon to not only flummox you but also confuse you to the core.

This is one affra taffri which you can do without and thankfully it has dropped on the OTT three months after its lukewarm release