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EERIE, SCARY, BINGE-ABLE FUN

has one of the series’ funniest scenes with him in a car. There is also a lengthy flashback about a matriarch’s witchcraft powers shot in an enticing orange glow that suggests a state of exploitative saturation. The flashback also sneaks in a little homage to Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘Mera baap chor hain’ tattoo from Deewaar.

All this tends to scatter the plot, make it zig and zag through situations that would have otherwise been avoided in a tightly-edited feature film. Also, as much as I loved the little girl Sam (played by Aarna Sharma) and her sleuthing activities with her young friends, it just didn’t seem to hit the right notes, veering from the over-cute to the outright listless.

What works is the ever-dependable Purab Kohli as a caring single parent and an inquisitive cop trying to piece together a series of bafflingly sinister scenarios.

The scenes inside the haunted bungalow are exquisitely shot, capturing as they do the rhythms of everyday activities pressurised by a spell of inexplicable happenings.

TYPEWRITER (NETFLIX)

STARRING: Purab Kohli, Palomi Ghosh, Samir Kochhar, Aarna Sharma

DIRECTOR: Sujoy Ghosh

H H H pounding out messages like ‘Bhoot is not Jhooth’.

A typewriter is an obsolete instrument. And yet, its sheer vintage value is preserved in writerdirector Sujoy Ghosh’s engaging genre-conforming yet unorthodox supernatural web series - about a discarded typewriter which does sinister things on its own, e.g.

‘Jhooth’ or not, Ghosh’s series Typewriter , available on Netflix, has a lot of fun with spirits. The writing is sprightly yet dark, grim yet giggly and briskly paced. This is not to suggest that Ghosh is trying to do a Stree.

You know, make ghosts funny. To its credit though, Typewriter succeeds in being humorous while scaring the hell out of us.

A family moves into an abandoned yet strikingly picturesque bungalow in Goa, India. We soon realise that the mom Jenny (Palomi Ghosh) has a deep and devastating connect with the home. The series gathers its strength here, hitting a solid punch to our guts.

Jenny’s husband (Samir Kochhar) is involved with a tartish temptress who

Typewriter should have concentrated more on the ghostly dynamics of the ‘haunted haveli’ rather than run around collecting proof of its own adventurous spirit regarding the ghostly genre.

Having said that, there is an ingrained warmth in the storytelling. And though the child actors do not have a well-appointed space in the voluminous plot, they succeed in imbuing a great deal of honesty to the telling of a spooky story that has the potential to be a pedestrian shiver giver, but manages to become something more.

Subhash K Jha