‘The Village’ series review: Arya’s horror series is corny and utterly contrived

A still from ‘The Village’
| Photo Credit: Prime Video

Every time a creator dares to explore a new space, especially if it’s in this risky railroad of a genre called ‘horror’, you wish for it to be novel enough to forgive its shortcomings. But The Village, billed as India’s first live-action adaptation of a graphic novel, is an unforgivably banal, corny and utterly contrived attempt that at times comes off as a mock-up of the done-to-dust horror tropes.

What’s disappointing is that you can see the potential in the world that creator Milind Rau tried to build, and why the original graphic novel must have felt compelling; there’s ample gore, diverse characters and a world tailor-made for thrilling storytelling. It’s a coastal town in Tuticorin called Kattiyal that harbours a terrifying forest and a deserted village, filled with bioluminescent flora and fauna, weird elves, a creepy pulsating creature like the one in John Carpenter’s The Thing, and zombie-like pus boils-filled creatures called mutants. But don’t get excited.

What triggers the plot forward is plain and simple. An ignorant family — Gautham (Arya), Neha (Divya Pillai), their daughter Maya (Baby Aazhiya) and their pet Beagle dog bafflingly named Hectic — ignorantly get stranded at Kattiyal due to a car puncture. Gautham goes alone to a nearby town to seek help, after which Neha and Maya are mysteriously abducted. Now, Gautham, with the help of Peter (George Maryan), Karunagam (Muthu Kumar), and Sakthivel (Naren), localities who share a history with Kattiyal, have to save the family.

Meanwhile, another branch of the storyline begins when Prakash (Arjun Chidambaram), a despicable, wheelchair-bound druggie, sends a group of mercenaries headed by Farhan (John Kokken), and some scientists to Kattiyal to retrieve a chemical called Lantanite that might aid him to walk again. It truly doesn’t help that you see Prakash’s arc from a mile away.

Firstly, throughout its six-episode run, The Village punishes you with mind-numbingly campy dialogues. Let slip even the exposition dumps and how unoriginal they are, the dialogues are somehow stretched beyond effect and at times repeated. A petrified man lights up a cigarette only to be politely told that it might attract unnecessary attention. Only to be followed by, “Also, smoking is injurious to health.” We didn’t know! Interactions between stone-cold mercenaries and panic-stricken scientists are decent spaces to introduce some levity but the jokes you get here make you wish for some skeleton in Kattiyal to wake up and object to such blasphemous attempts at humour.

So much of this screen time could have been used to dig deep into these characters, who otherwise come across as cardboard cutouts. When one of the soldiers dies — not a spoiler — the mercenaries do a farewell ritual of sorts with a dramatic score in the background. You. Simply. Don’t. Care. Even with the presence of other characters, like a scientist named Sanjeev, written to annoy you with their silliness, these so-called mercenaries somehow top it all even with how they shoot something that is a feet away.

It’s also appalling how except for Naren and Muthu Kumar’s (who are truly impressive in their roles), you don’t get any sense that these are real characters reacting to a supernatural situation. George Maryan is wasted in this role, but Arya’s Gautham truly is a revelation as one of the worst-ever horror series protagonists. The scene where he has to showcase some panic after realising his family has gone missing in a haunted place is just one of the many examples.

Nothing feels organic and you are constantly put off by something or the other. When a man saves his crew (predictably so) with a sharp shot from his shotgun, the camera randomly zooms in and pauses as he holds his pose; a dramatic effect that sticks out like a sore thumb. Such spoilsport details continue even in the last two episodes — the better ones of the six — when you begin to invest in the proceedings thanks to unrestrained gore and a few unexpected turns of events.

Credit where credit is due; the set designs, particularly inside the factory in Kattiyal, are mighty impressive. But you can’t say the same for other technical aspects like the colour grading, and you never understand why one part of Kattiyal seems to be graded day-for-night, while the same part on a different day or a different part of the village at the same time looks starkly different.

The Village is certainly an ambitious attempt at something fresh for Tamil cinema, but merely setting it in rural Tamil Nadu and mentioning a real social issue in a backstory doesn’t make it an ingenious local attempt, if the rest of it still comes across as a bad imitation of Western titles. There is still some potential in this world and the series does hint at a second season, but do we need that?

The Village is currently streaming on Prime Video