A sPINe-tINgLINg custoDy bAttLe

A Atma

sTarriNg: Bipasha Basu, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Doyel Dhawan and Shernaz Patel wriTEr-DirEc TOr: Suparn Verma HHH

All of us have to live with our fears. Sometimes we have to die with them. That’s where trouble starts in Suparn Verma’s smartly-written, nimbly-executed shiver-giver which, blessedly, doesn’t lapse into a gore fest... At least not until the last few reels when the body count piles up faster than we can say ‘Aatma’.

By the end of this horror drama, I get the feel that the script, which has so far moved at a smooth pace, kills too many people. Life is short. Shorter if you have a dead spouse determined to wrangle your only child’s security by legal or otherworldly means.

Early on we see Nawazuddin as Bipasha Basu’s brutal husband twisting her arm, hurling her to the floor, hurting and wounding her pride and her body.

Domestic violence is a serious crime.

It can get nasty and ugly on screen when put into the wrong directorial hands. Director Verma doesn’t succumb to sleaze. He creates an inner-belly of monstrous disturbances underneath the smooth normal face.

At the top, the movie displays polished surfaces smiling benignly into our faces. The director makes telling use of suburban spaces: the marble floors, the freshly-painted walls, the imported kitchen appliances, eye-catching furniture and the luminous lighting, all seem to suggest that life is beautiful.

The fissures and aberrations make themselves apparent through the fabric of normalcy until we are left gawking at the gaping wounds that fester underneath.

At heart, Aatma is a custody battle for a child, a Kramer vs. Kramer, where one parent is dead.

Verma shoots the chilling premise with minimum ostentation. Ironically the husband, as played by the stark and startling Nawazuddin, is frighteningly demoniacal even when shown alive. In a scene that progresses effortlessly from the ordinary to the ominous Nawazuddin after losing custody battle in the judge’s chamber, threatens the judge and thumbs his nose at any law that separates him from his daughter. Here, and anywhere else, living or dead, Nawazuddin’s omnipresence is a terrifying prospect.

Verma makes austere use of terror tactics. Mirror images that don’t match up with the people, a ball rolling down an empty school corridor, and in the frightening finale, Nawazuddin leading his daughter by her hand down a railway track, Verma’s images are vivid and spine-tingling. He uses space to convey distances that stretch into hearts filled with emptiness.