Movie Review: Stree

Movie Review: Stree
Rating: 3/5
Director: Amar Kaushik
Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Shraddha Kapoor, Aparshakti Khurrana, Abhishek Banerjee, Pankaj Tripathi, Vijay Raaz

Stree Movie Trailer

Stree, directed by Amar Kaushik, is a comedy about a lovelorn tailor who falls for a girl who may or may not be the ‘Stree’ the town fears. She visits the town annually on the days of the festival, keeps vanishing in mysterious ways, never enters the temple, and, perhaps most damningly in the eyes of the tailor and his friends, doesn’t own a mobile phone. Could young Viki, a tailor so accurate he can measure women with his eyes, have found himself a potential girlfriend? Or is this girl who wants him to make her lehenga the kind of bhoot who likes her clothes bespoke?

The script of this film is like those jokes which are not very entertaining when you write them but they become funny once you get on the stage & start adding your things. To bring on this story on a big screen was a great gamble because of its very finite scope but Sumit Arora’s dialogues does the magic.

Based loosely on an urban legend from Bangalore, it is a potentially hilarious setup, and Kaushik has a solid cast with Rajkummar Rao as Viki, flanked by Aparshakti Khurana and Abhishek Banerjee as his two buddies, but despite the immediate likeability of these performers playing off one another with small-town gusto, Stree doesn’t bring down the house. Follow Spotlife Asia for the latest Entertainment and Lifestyle news.

Rajkummar Rao, as usual, steals the show. He’s making very monotonous for us reviewers to keep praising him. With every of his movie (Not Fanney Khan) I just keep thinking the synonyms of brilliant I’ll use for him. His portrayal of Vicky required someone only like Rajkummar Rao. He underplays his innocence very well & that’s what make this performance a memorable one.

Shraddha Kapoor looks & acts beautiful. She shares a good chemistry with Rajkummar. She just dazzles up the atmosphere with her smile. Pankaj Tripathi was badly missed in first half but he owned the second half. It seems Sumit Arora wrote some dialogues especially for Pankaj because the way he delivers, it proves his ownership over them.

Amar Kaushik experiments with the film & it works well for everyone. It surely could’ve been tighter & there was a lot of scope to improve the story. Amar decided to go an unconventional route & stayed honest to the genre. Inclusion of slapstick comedy would’ve been a kind of cheating.

Sachin-Jigar’s songs are a treat! Every single one of them works very well & not seem forced. Aao Kabhi Haveli Pe is used in the background whereas Nora Fatehi melts you with Kamariya. Ketan Sodha’s background score knits into the situations very well & plays a major role in creating the required atmosphere.

Stree is all about men who should know better. Kaushik’s film gives us not only a pleasant/terrified town, but a place that is both sexually repressed as well as sexually keen: old men have birds-and-bees conversations with their sons, grown men aren’t allowed to watch lovemaking scenes in the movies, and yet the word ‘friendship’ implies a relationship between young men and local prostitutes.