Maddock Films’ “Stree-verse” is arguably the most enjoyable franchise kicking around Hindi cinema these days. Though that’s not saying much. The promising horror-comedy universe—made up of Stree, Stree 2, Bhediya, and Munjya— enters its fifth instalment with Thamma, from Munjya director Aditya Sarpotdar back at the helm. This time, it’s vampires.
To call Thamma the Stree-verse’s first misstep would be an understatement. At worst, you might expect the fifth film in an ambitious universe to cling to the established “winning formula” and give us more of the same. But Thamma struggles to even deliver the basics. Aditya Sarpotdar’s film is a testament to what conviction, or the lack of it, looks like.
Thamma Has No Bite
Previously (reportedly) titled The Vampires Of Vijaynagar, the template of Sarpotdar’s film is familiar. Delhi boy Alok (an uncharacteristically unexciting Ayushmann Khurrana) is backpacking through an “eerie” jungle with friends when he’s attacked by a bear, only to be saved by a mysterious woman named Tadaka (Rashmika Mandanna).
Aside from being uncomfortably styled exclusively for the male gaze, you can see the thought behind casting Rashmika as a vampire—to use her deer-in-headlights, never-blinking presence to embody an undead, immortal being.
Tadaka belongs to a secret community of vampires, or Betaals. When her clan finds Alok, they imprison him. But for the sake of love, she helps him escape and leaves her world behind for him.
The pair can’t populate a 2.5-hour film with convincing connection, let alone basic chemistry, yet we’re made to believe they want to spend a literal eternity together as immortal beings.
When the pair return to Alok’s Delhi home, “comedy” ensues as she tries to fit into his life and adjust to living among humans. Except that the fish-out-of-water template that takes up the narrative’s first half is tedious.
There is no lack of promising comedic scenarios in seeing her trying to fit in with regular people and live in Alok’s home with his suspicious parents (played by Paresh Rawal and Geeta Aggarwal). They only eat vegetarian food, while she wants to eat the neighbour's dog, for example. But the humour here rarely sparkles.
Call it a crutch or a feature, but the one thing we’ve always been able to count on these films for is the humour and merging middle-class charms with otherworldly thrills. While Rashmika brings little dimension to Tadaka, comedic or otherwise, the exasperated everyman is a template Ayushmann Khurrana has repeatedly aced, but Thamma sees him on autopilot.
As the evil Betaal, a constantly cackling Nawazuddin Siddiqui hams it up for days and seems to have a blast but, unfortunately, that doesn’t quite translate to our experience of the character.
Ayushmann On Autopilot
The “horror” half of the film is equally flat. While Stree and Bhediya used horror tropes playfully, and Munjya was genuinely unsettling and creepy in moments (including Munjya snapping the neck of an old woman), Thamma struggles to go beyond flaring fangs that quickly feel like cheap, roadside Halloween costumes.
Aditya Sarpotdar isn’t able to craft any sort of aura around these figures to make us buy into their creatureness.
The worldbuilding similarly ranges from awkward and derivative to half-hearted. Sarpotdar and his writers Arun Fulara, Suresh Mathew, and Niren Bhatt (one of the creative architects of the Stree-verse) try and fail to “Indianise” vampires by hurling half-baked mythology at us about how they’re actually spirits here to fight off evil beings.
Tadaka and her clan are framed as “good” vampires who only preyed on bad people. That is, until they were put off by the ugliness of humanity after witnessing communal riots decades earlier, as we see in one particularly awkward sequence.
Panchayat’s excellent Faisal Malik plays a cop who knows about the secret underground world of Betaals and ensures it’s kept hidden from humans. It’s yet another idea that’s ripe with potential but the narrative doesn’t know what to do with it.
Speaking of which, what’s the film’s version of a secret underground vampire world, you ask? A bunch of leather-clad folks in a night club in arguably the year’s most decaf Hollywood sequence committed to the big screen, which makes Blade look like a pocket knife.
I also couldn't explain the rules of Betaal combat to you. These are immortal beings who can’t be hurt unless it’s by a “senior” vampire. I think. So, when we see two “regular” vampires face off, there are no real stakes (pun intended). Also, if a vampire sucks the blood of another vampire, do they become a... double vampire? Vampire Double XXL? Venti Vampire? 2Vampire2Furious? Vampire Daddy?
Laugh Out Loud Worldbuilding
If anything, after a point, the rules of this world become punchlines. The three biggest laughs of Thamma come at the expense of the film.
First, there’s an odd chant and gesture Betaals do throughout the film to force other Betaals to reveal their identity. I don’t think it’s supposed to be played for humour, but it’s hilariously silly for all the wrong reasons.
Second, in the final face-off, Ayushmann’s Alok is seen wearing the most awkwardly obvious prosthetic muscle sleeve, thereby cementing how little the makers think of the audience.
The third comes at the end. In order to set up the next installment of the franchise, Alok is told that, to level up and face new threats, he must drink the blood of the very (familiar) creature that’s been trying to drink his blood for the entire second half (???). Move over, circle jerk, here we get a circle… suck?
Thamma doesn’t even work as a generic, decent-time-at-the-movies blockbuster.
It makes sense that many of these vampires are supposedly hundreds of years old, considering the janky action sequences, in particular, feel like they belong to a bygone era—barring one serviceable rooftop fight between two creatures, which is functional at worst and Twilight at best.
Aside from “star power,” there’s little here that feels like it was meant for the big screen. Streaming shows have tried multiple times to play with vampires and zombies (Tooth Pari and Betaal on Netflix, and The Village on Amazon Prime Video), and while none were winners, the conviction and craft on offer here isn't much better.
Let’s Talk Lokah
I’ve now held out for as long as humanly possible, but it’s time we talk about the “L word”. Almost exactly two months ago, Malayalam cinema gave us Dominic Arun’s thrilling and thoughtful Lokah, which was similarly about a secret, fantastical world of mythological creatures within a narrative centered on a female vampire.
In Lokah, we felt the isolation, loneliness, and the weight of a life lived over centuries of Kalyani Priyadarshan’s Chandra, whereas Rashmika’s Tadaka is reduced to doe-eyed sex appeal. Lokah was similarly played for comedy by following an exasperated everyman in Sunny (a glorious Naslen). Except it was actually funny.
There, we discovered the truth about Chandra through Sunny’s eyes. We only found out who, and what, she was when he did. In Thamma, we know what Tadaka is from the start and we have to wait through an entire painful first half for Alok to catch up.
Maybe there’s a case to be made that Thamma does, in fact, subconsciously sell the vampire experience effectively because, for its 2.5-hour run time, I frequently felt joyless and dead inside.
Thamma releases in theatres on 21 October.
(Suchin Mehrotra is a critic and film journalist who covers Indian cinema for a range of publications. He's also the host of The Streaming Show podcast on his own YouTube channel. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)