'Bhediya' review: Bollywood's overlong werewolf comedy delivers powerful environmental message

The comedy horror has captivated Indian audiences since the early 2000s, with over 100 films genre being released. Amar Kaushik's "Bhediya" (literally "wolf"), Bollywood's first creature comedy, despite its punishing length, is a wildly entertaining adventure through the jungles of northeast India that delivers pro- environment and anti-racism and also has the potential to become a franchise.

Bollywood's top star Varun Dhawan plays Bhaskar, an ambitious Delhi-based road worker who has mortgaged his family home in order to secure a contract to build a highway through the dense jungles of Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India, which borders China. He is accompanied by his cousin Janardhan (Abhishek Banerjee) and has locals Jomin (Paalin Kabaak) and Panda (Deepak Dobriyal) to help him. The catch is that he has to get permission from the local villagers. The village elders object, but Bhaskar convinces the young people that they need malls and "Netflix not nature". With the help of corrupt local officials, he manages to get enough signatures to swing the deal.

To complicate matters, Bhaskar was also badly bitten in the rear by a wolf and is being treated by a veterinarian Anika (Kriti Sanon). The wound heals too quickly and Bhaskar turns into a werewolf at night, taking out the officials who approved the highway project one by one. Panda enlists the help of a 120-year-old shaman to turn Bhaskar back into a human, but local police and militia are determined to track down both Bhaskar's werewolf and the wolf that bit him.

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With this third film, Kaushik established a tradition of delivering strong social messages through mass entertainment package. Her debut horror comedy 'Stree' (2018) was a feminist fable, while 'Bala' (2019) dealt with alopecia and skin color shaming. In "Bhediya" the main message is to save the environment and the other Indian practice that is denounced is the habit of pejoratively describing people from the North East as Chinese - a casual racism that is prevalent in the rest of the country. . The messages are on the nose without any subtlety, but that's often the best way to get them to a mass audience, and Kaushik and his writer Niren Bhatt achieve this effectively.

The emphasis in "Bhediya" is more on often juvenile and sometimes scatological comedy than creatures . When the creatures appear, it's a triumph of top-notch visual effects, executed by the team that also worked on blockbuster 'RRR' at London's Motion Picture Co. Performances are excellent throughout with Dhawan and Sanon carrying the film with ease, but the most notable is Banerjee, an actor who can pull off psychopaths and goofy comics with equal bliss and timing.

With a running time of over two and a half hours, the film overstays its welcome, compounded by breakers Bollywood's traditional song-and-dance speed and romantic interludes, which periodically interrupt the plot of the werewolf tale. There are a few MCU-style Easter eggs in the end credits and the second of them places "Bhediya" squarely in the "Stree" universe. A franchise surely beckons.

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