Three engineering students take a room in a rundown hostel with a very strict warden. And then, they run into a ghost. And then, there’s another ghost. The film has appealing performances and is amusing. It has modest ambitions and it achieves them with ease. That’s the quick review. A more detailed analysis follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Maharaja Hostel is a launch vehicle for influencers Akhil NRD, Akhil Sha, and Sharath Babu. I don’t know about them on social media, but there are so many influencers out there that we know what to expect when a movie has them up front and centre. This is Charu Wakan’s debut feature, and though it’s labelled as a horror-comedy, it is never truly horrifying, and neither is it outrageously funny. The story is about three engineering students who end up saving a village that’s haunted by a ghost. The events have a vibe that’s pleasantly nuts. Like reels, the scenes have the feel of scrolling past the screen. But the writing is tight and coherent. I loved the touch that, apart from the main ghost, there is a surprise sub-ghost. This character made the movie for me. Maharaja Hostel may not reinvent the genre, but within its modest ambitions, it ends up an easy-breezy watch.
The film opens and closes near a shrine of a tribal goddess, and there’s a nice angle about motherhood that comes full-circle at the end. But thankfully, there’s no message, and there’s no deep-dive about the theory that maybe even a goddess wants to feel what it’s like to be a mother. This is just a plot point that kicks off the story, and for this story, it’s just enough. Because the more important scenes are like the one where our three loser-heroes share a cigarette and wonder if they reduce the time between each puff, and therefore extract more puffs per cigarette. Another important scene introduces us to a character named Deepika OD, and she hates her initials. Another character is a vlogger who likes to record episodes in haunted houses. But the most important person here is the warden of Maharaja Hostel, a strict man who carries a cane and wakes everyone up at 4 am.
The story takes a turn when our three heroes venture into a forest and run into a ghost. It follows them back to the hostel, for some reason I could not figure out. (Or maybe it’s just in their imagination.) But this is not a film you want to think about too deeply. There are some spooky experiences, where the actors on screen seem more scared than the audience. The surprise comes about when the protagonists chance upon the second ghost. The star of the film is Sajin Cherukayil, who plays the warden as some kind of tough teddy bear. He has been in a couple of films by Senna Hegde and Gireesh AD, and I hope this is his breakthrough. His portions are the best, but with the appealing young performers (including Sandeep SP, another influencer) almost everything works at the level of an easy watch. And sometimes, that’s enough.
