‘Bohurupi’ is now the most successful film at the Bengali box office and what has worked for the movie so well is perplexing people. It is not just the timing and a free run at the theatres. Every year multiple movies are released during the Durga Puja and Bohurupi too had to face some hard competition.
Then what is the secret of the movie? It has brought a fresh air in the industry that is being weighed down by clichés. There are only horror movies being made and the rest are all adaptations of classics. On OTT and on feature films as well there is this tendency of adapting films from popular novels or at least taking inspiration from them. ‘Shashtri’, ‘Parineeta’, ‘Babli’, ‘Athhoi’, ‘Nayan Rahasya’, ‘Kabuliwala’ and many others are there. It is being overdone now and the film business needs to be a separate entity reeling upon its own original stories.
Bohurupi has offered the audience a heist thriller. A Dhoom-like suspense, but that too very much drenched with rural Bengali vibes. There are folk songs and dialogues in local dialects, the pretentious so called appeal of international is not there and that is what makes it special. It is an honest movie and other filmmakers too need to follow its lead now. Horror movies and detective thrillers adapted from popular books have been done many times now and now filmmakers should come up with stories that seem real and new.