This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on October 31, 2019.
We first met the four friends Mahadevan (Mukesh), Govindankutty (Siddique), Appukuttan (Jagadish) and Thomaskutty (Ashokan) in the 1990 film In Harihar Nagar, a comedy thriller from the writing/directing duo Siddique-Lal which became a massive hit and which remains a cult classic. Lal brought the quartet back for a sequel, 2 Harihar Nagar, in which the four layabouts from the first film have careers and marriages and families. That led to Lal creating one more film, In Ghost House Inn, in which the most unsuccesful of the four, Thomaskutty, decides to buy a bungalow in Ooty in order to turn it into a resort hotel. The bungalow he buys, though, comes with a history – legend has it that the owner, Dorothy Fernandez, killed her husband and his lover, and then her driver who discovered the murder, and that the bungalow is haunted by their ghosts.
Thomaskutty knows the story, and knows that many people have bought the bungalow and then sold it back to Madam Fernandez at a cheaper price just to get away from it, but he’s convinced that there’s no truth to the story and that he can proceed with his plans. He hires staff, and invites his three friends and their families to come stay at the bungalow. The four friends encounter a strange man, Father Dominic (Nedumudi Venu), who warns them that terrible things will happen to them. This is coupled by the staff suddenly deciding to leave because they fear the strange things happening in what they believe is a haunted house.
The friends approach Father Dominic to have him come exorcise the house, though things get off on a bad footing when it seems that Father Dominic really isn’t a priest, just someone interested in the occult and the paranormal. But, in the end – probably because the things Father Dominic warns them of come true, like the clothing of one of the wives catching on fire – the friends decide to allow Father Dominic to try to perform the exorcism. This doesn’t go well – the ghost who seems to have possessed the maidservant (the only staff member who remained) proves a formidable opponent, and Father Dominic ends up dying of a heart attack. Thomaskutty, frightened, decides to sell the house back to Madam Fernandez at half the price he paid for it. To reveal any more would completely destroy the plot of the film, but suffice it to say that there are some twists at the end that reveal that Thomaskutty’s initial instinct, that there was more going on to the haunting than meets the eye, was a good one.
It’s true that In Ghost House Inn is not going to be the best example of Malayalam cinema to present to folks who are now turning to Malayalam films because of the industry’s track record in producing excellent films. If anything, I’d say that all three films are probably required viewing for completist fans of cinematographer Venu (who has also directed several exellent films, including Munnariyippu starring Mammootty), but are probably not going to be for someone looking to expand their Malayalam film experience beyond the New Gen classics (although I am aware of In Harihar Nagar’s cult film status). Probably the best comparison I can come up with for this series is that it reminds me a lot of the Hindi-language Golmaal films, in which a group of pretty much good-for-nothing friends get up to all sorts of high jinks. “Golmaal” means chaos or confusion, and that pretty much is the standard for both In Harihar Nagar and In Ghost House Inn (I’ve not seen 2 Harihar Nagar, but I’m pretty sure it is cut from the same cloth as the other two films). Like the Golmaal films, the women, too (here, actors Rohini, Lena, Rakhi and Reena Basheer play the wives) are pretty much just window dressing. The hauntings are more laugh-inducing than truly frightening, much silliness ensues, and everything turns out all right in the end. And I had a few laughs along the way, which, sometimes, is all you can ask of a film.