Tantra Movie Review: A tiresome, convoluted horror-thriller

In Tantra, there is a lot told to us early on about our protagonist Rekha (Ananya Nagalla), which leaves us curious and intrigued. She sees ghosts on her daily walk to college, which none of her friends have a whiff about. She is often visited by spirits at night, who demand a certain sacrifice from her while she is unconscious. In her spare time, Rekha also seeks advice from an ageing Muslim man, who seems to be well-versed in the supernatural. These parts come early in the film and create considerable dramatic tension. It’s good fodder for a horror thriller—to have a character you care about, without knowing too much about. 

However, while attempting to keep the audience suspenseful, Srinivas Gopisetti, the director of Ananya, goes into an overdrive. The result is a blatant misfire.

Director: Srinivas Gopisetti

Cast: Ananya Nagalla, Dhanush Raghumundry, Laxman Meesala, Saloni Aswani, Kushalini Puliapa, Manoj Muthyam, Sharath Barigela

While the first half is fairly tolerable, Tantra entirely loses the plot post-intermission, opening too many subplots without any satisfying cohesion. There are too many new elements that only end up aggravating the viewer’s impatience. You can forgive the makers for low production values, but not for employing unsophisticated tricks to tell a story that is already riddled with cliches. After a point, the exposition descends into unintentional humour. Srinivas tries his best to keep things interesting by dividing his narrative into thematic chapters, but it doesn’t help. With how they use and discard characters like Rekha’s mother (Saloni Aswani) at will, you realise that logical consistency is not a priority for the writing team.

Also, for a film that’s so reliant on thrills, Tantra has barely any genuine moments of thrill to offer (barring the last 20 minutes). For the longest stretches in the second half, characters just indulge in excessive explanations of things that happened to them. There is barely any momentum, which is a cardinal sin for this genre. 

There is a rare moment around the interval mark when Tantra grabs our attention, introducing a new character. This new figure is ominous, domineering, and has a dark connection to our protagonist and their traumatic past. For viewers, who are largely convinced of their familiarity with this universe by now, this development feels unsettling in a good way, starting the point of conflict from scratch. Unfortunately, Srinivas fails to sustain the level of threat we initially sense from this character, for Tantra is one of those films that bites more than it can chew. 

Strangely enough, what works to a relative extent, is the love story between the two leads. When we first see Teju (Dhanush Raghumudri) and Rekha (Ananya), they are the kind of lovebirds who exchange soulful glances and eat from each other’s leftovers as a form of love language. When the entire town goes to visit a local fair, Teju and Rekha stay back and stroll around their village. This scene doesn’t lead to a sexual encounter, but the warmth and intimacy shared between the two rings true nonetheless.

Unfortunately, despite a preachy monologue towards the end about the power of love, Tantra is not a love story. It is a horror thriller that mistakes convolution for complexity. There is excessive mumbo-jumbo thrown at us, which is the director’s way of conveying to us that a lot of thought has gone into carving out this concept.

Speaking of the love story, it’s the male protagonist Teja who remains the most relatable for the viewer. Just like Teja, we are bombarded with new information in every other scene. It’s too much to keep up with. His state of mind consistently depends on what Rekha decides to tell him. After a point, Teja has no clue who to trust or what reality is. In a rational world, Teja would have broken up with Rekha somewhere before the final act, for his own sanity. 

However, since that is a fictional world, they live happily ever after. In the real world, we get on with our job of trying to explain in 700 words why Tantra remains a massively disappointing theatrical experience.