Reviews & Ratings for
Ghost Stories (2020)

Phaltu Bhoot!
Ahh, after Bombay Talkies, the hum drum ‘Lust Stories’… We now have ‘Ghost Stories’.
Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been ‘Paranormal Stories’, but Indians only understand the word Ghost. Which encompasses it all for us, werewolves, zombies, witches be what it may, they are all Ghosts…
With this we get the Zoya Akhtar ‘Ghost Story’. This short is an exercise in trying not be cliché. Trying VERY hard not to give that jump scare. They spend so much time in setting up a fake sort of non scare that the final reveal is flat and frankly boring. Janhvi Kapoor is a VERY bad actress and it shows. She cannot keep the story focussed on her try as she might, her troubles and life do not seem real, just a screenwriters version of a difficult life.
Rating: 5.5/10 for The Nurse
Then we get the worst short film in this compilation. Maybe Anurag Sir should spend less time quitting and rejoining twitter and more time on his film making skills. I wonder how he managed to make some really good films. The shit he makes now cannot be called film making, but of an exercise in trying to copy Darren Aronofsky… The BIRD story is painfully boring, doesn’t make any sense and somehow tries too many idea and does not progress enough at the same time. I had to take a 2 day break after seeing this one so that my mood would change. That’s how bad this segment is.
Rating: 0/10. No rating deserved for the Bird.
After a 2 day break, I resumed with Dibaker’s segment. Some actors in his team have compared his work to that of Satyajit Rays. If my late father had been alive, he would have sought out such people and given them a stern talking to… Ray is on a completely different league that no modern Indian film maker can hope to reach up to. That aside, this segment is full of allegory and insinuation. None of which makes sense till the last scene. Normally I LOVE stories which are nonsensical until the end reveal, but this one was WAY over done. The only positive is that I atleast understood the allegory as compared to Anurag Sir’s segment whose themes melted my brain (temporarily).
The rich and poor divide is explored in this segment but no stretch of the imagination does this qualify as a ‘Ghost’ story.
Rating : 6/10.
Then we come down to the segment by Karan Johar. Even in Lust stories, I found his story to be the most properly directed. Same for this one. Though the story is super weak and lame, it is quite decently directed and manages to convey the emotions and the concept well. It’s not very good by any means but it’s still a huge improvement to the first 2 segments. This just proves that despite his antics, Johar is a solid director. The story of a dead Grandma and her over obsessed Grandson is a cliché one but since the entire film is not that great, this one gets a pass.
Rating : 6/10. Ok to see once. Has some funny meta moments.

Overall : If this is the best Indian Directors can achieve, that speaks volumes about how really talented Indians haven’t gotten the chance to come behind or ahead of the camera.
This ‘Ghost Stories’ is skip able at best. Its eye wateringly boring. Its not campy or goofy, takes itself way too seriously and not worth a watch at all.

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Story 1 & 4 were good. Story 3 lost its way.
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