2 Stars (out of 4)
Watch Chhorii 2 on Amazon Prime
The followup to Amazon Prime Video’s 2021 folk horror flick Chhorii (“Girl“) doesn’t quite match the quality of the original. Chhorii 2 starts strong but meanders toward an unsatisfying conclusion.
Chhorii 2 takes place seven years after the events of the first film, which saw heavily pregnant Sakshi (Nushrratt Bharuccha) escape the clutches of her husband Rajbir (Saurabh Goyal) with the help of his former wife Rani (Pallavi Ajay). The two women now live together in a city, raising Rani’s daughter Ishani (Hardika Sharma) in a home owned by police inspector Samar (Gashmeer Mahajani).
Samar recounts the events of the first film and explains what happened immediately after. Rani and Sakshi walked to the police station where Samar worked. In order to protect Rani, Sakshi confessed to murdering Rajbir and his parents. When the women led Samar to the scene of the crime, the bodies were gone. Panicked Sakshi went into early labor, and Ishita was born. Samar’s sheltered them in his family home ever since.
One night, Ishita and Rani are kidnapped and taken to the fields surrounding Rajbir’s village. Sakshi and Samar follow, but Sakshi is nabbed, too, dragged into an underground complex of rooms accessible via wells in the field. The dry wells are evidence of the drought plaguing the village — a problem tribal leader Taau (Kuldeep Sareen) believes Ishita can fix.
The village worships an entity called Pradhan Ji that lives in a room at the bottom of one of the wells. He’s alternatively described as the deity responsible for the drought and the ancestor of the residents of the village, all of whom will die if Pradhan Ji does. The mythology at work is a little unclear. Taau’s solution is to get a new wife and servant for ancient Pradhan Ji, and Ishita is chosen even though she’s only seven years old.
The task of preparing the girl for the marriage ritual falls to Pradhan Ji’s current wife, Daasi Ma (Soha Ali Khan), whose very name means “servant.” In serving Pradhan Ji, Daasi Ma gained a few magical powers, including astral projection. Of course that comes at the expense of all of the other women and girls in the village, who live in subjugation to men if they aren’t killed right after birth.
The social justice message in Chhorii 2 is just as unmistakable as it was in Chhorii, yet writer-director Vishal Furia again closes his film with statistics about child marriage in India. If viewers can’t get the moral point from a story this unambiguous, they should stick to documentaries.
Even before the stats appear on screen, Chhorii 2 ends in disappointing fashion. In order to set up a third film — which is clearly Furia’s goal, even though one hasn’t been officially announced yet — Furia eschews a true cliffhanger and instead just cuts the story off mid-scene. It feels unfinished as-is, and it will be totally unsatisfying should a third film not materialize.
Chhorii 2 has the same creepy rural aesthetic that worked so well in the original movie, and the labyrinthine underground lair is unnerving. Sakshi’s navigation of the haunted maze is the film’s strongest sequence. The story becomes less compelling when it veers away from horror and into revenge territory. There’s little catharsis to be found when battling a misogynistic culture this violent.
Bharuccha again proves herself a capable lead performer. Khan doesn’t act with the same frequency she once did, so it’s fun to see her in this chilling role as the demonic bride. Little Hardika Sharma does a nice job, too.
Furia has built a compelling world for this franchise, and he’s taking a real gamble by not giving Chhorii 2 a distinct (if slightly ambiguous) ending. Here’s hoping it pays off and he gets to finish his story.
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