Ooru Peru Bhairavakona Movie Review: A wafer-thin comedy disguised as a mystery

American author John Gardner has once famously said that there are only two kinds of stories in the world, one, where a person goes on an adventure and another, where a stranger comes to town. Adventure, stranger and town is the abstract triad upon which VI Anand’s Ooru Peru Bhairavakona rests. When we are introduced to the film's protagonist Basava (Sundeep Kishan), he is seen locked in a room with a loot of jewels he has robbed from a wedding. While a mob of wedding guests is baying for his blood, the bride from the wedding calls the police officers, asking them to intervene and stop the guy from getting killed. And then we see him wear the jewels on his person, wear a fireproof suit on top and escape the mob by setting fire on himself before fleeing. In the beginning, it feels like an uncommon-yet-cool-enough way of introducing the hero. We do not register the details around this event. But eventually, every piece in this puzzle gains more importance as the story progresses. 

Cast - Sundeep Kishan, Varsha Bollamma, Kavya Thapar, Vennela Kishore, Harsha Chemudu, P Ravi Shankar, Vadivukkarasi 

Director - VI Anand

For the most part, Ooru Peru Bhairavakona is a linear story, taking place over a period of two nights. But Basava’s motivations, which involve Bhoomi, his lady love, and Bhoomi’s motivations themselves, are the only times when the film cuts into flashbacks. The central characters of the film, which involve Basava, Basava's aide John (Harsha Chemudu), Geetha (Kavya Thapar), a fellow scamster and Bhoomi (Varsha Bollamma), a tribal woman tasked with the film's most holier-than-thou purpose are all runaways of some kind. The film's titular town/character Bhairavakona, built with flourishes of Wikipedia-level lore and Brahmastra-coded neon light VFX, is where these runaways get stuck. 

Deception is Ooru Peru Bhairavakona’s primary characteristic. If Basava makes a living out of deceiving people as a stunt double, Geetha uses a bottle of chicken blood and an overall damsel-in-distress ploy, to deceive passersby on a highway. Bhoomi, whose intentions are hidden in a box of bones, later deceives Basava by making him walk right into his own death. The dead cosplay as the living in Bhairavakona, while the living either function as victims or peacemakers (senior actor Vadivukkurasi plays one, in more costume than context). Ravi Shankar and a band of ghouls play with their brand of deception, with VI Anand putting a zombiesque spin on their coterie. These deceptions would have all worked had it not been for Ooru Peru Bhairavakona's most damning deception, where a film that opens with the title card ‘A VI Anand Magic’ turns out to be a comedy furnished with generic touches of romance and social commentary. 

Despite genre-bound horror and fantasy films being a hard sell, watering them down with comedy, more often than not, reflects poorly on the film’s narrative finesse. This is where analysing Ooru Peru Bhairavakona gets tricky because the film's gags (one of which involves Vennela Kishore playing a misogynist in the most literal sense), do manage to elicit chuckles from the audience. But can I wholeheartedly blame a filmmaker for stepping back from the risks of making a thorough fantasy? Maybe I can. Maybe I should. But the fact remains that while Ooru Peru Bhairavakona does not succeed as much as it should have, it does not even fail as much as it could have. But to give credit where it is due, I did respond to the film's harmless gags the way the filmmakers intended them to be. Here is where the film's deceptions contribute to an effect of ambiguity. Ooru Peru Bhairavakona falls short of its potential, but remains, at its best, as a passable entertainer.