Bindi movies, also known as Pottu, is a 2019 Indian Tamil-language horror comedy film by producer John Max made for Shalom Studios. It’s a mid-valued Tamil production that mostly flew under the radar during theatrical releases and only seems to acquire some cult attention after its Hindi dubbed version was digitally released on the Indian streaming platform Pen Movies.
Bindi Movies Plot & Summary:
The film revolves around a straightforward premise where a medical college student gets possessed by an apparition who is seeking vengeance on the university’s dean. Tamil regular Bharath stars opposite newcomer Srushti Dange as the central character Arjun, an irresponsible and impulsive student who manages to get into medical school by fraudulent means.
When he is caught cheating and confronted by the school committee with a high possibility of permanent suspension, he turns to suicide by cutting his wrist with a piece of glass. However, as his blood spills on the tomb of Pottu, a mysterious ghost enters his body which forces him to behave like a girl. What follows is the unraveling of the mystery behind Pottu and her goals.
Bindi Movies Production Details:
The film is produced by Shalom Studios, a relatively new mid-level Indian production company based in Tamil Nadu specializing in feature-length films. The projects have been in producer John Max’s woodworks since as far as 2015 when it was revealed he’d continue to collaborate with director V.C Vadivudaiyan on a horror-comedy film as they were in production for another project then.
Bharath, fresh off a career comeback from a sequence of moderate commercial success, was signed onto the leading role, with three B-tier actresses, Ineya, Namitha, and Srushti Dange, to presume the roles of the apparition, the antagonist, and the love interest successively.
Despite Bindi’s moderate scale and small crew compares to Tamil’s other production counterparts which often seek to emphasize their cinematic qualities through magnitude, there’s still a significant level of commitment to the film’s production design as huge sets were erected at an altitude of 2,000 feet at the filming location.
Bindi Movies Review:
Although director Vadivudaiyan has never really been known for his stellar records of high-quality films, there’s regardless some silver of expectation for a mid-scale production company much as Shalom Studios to pull off an entertaining flick that would be delivered on its sincerity through delightful charms and wits. Instead, the audience ends up getting an absolute mess of a film that continues to drag desperately on to no avail.
It only takes the first few minutes of the film for you to want to leave the theater. Bindi quickly places all its faults on the table from the opening scenes. The film exercises a degree of excessiveness that seems to hold no functional storytelling purposes; it’s so visually jarring it can almost be described as nauseating and the sound design is so overmixed that the shouting and loud background noise become rancid after a while. It’s soon become clear that the film suffers from a common situation where a mid-scale production tries to make its final products as grand as possible only to backfire immediately.
Similarly, Bind’s narrative is a mixture of different tones and moods which blends distastefully wretched together. But moreover, the plot of Bindi is just extremely formulaic; there are ghosts, a method to check the ghost’s presence, a witch doctor which arrives to remove the jinx, a flashback that reveals that the ghost was misunderstood, and a revenge sequence against an even larger threat in the film. The film ultimately offers very little to the table, instead, it regurgitates the same exhausted ghost story over and over again.
The film’s overstuffed characters’ appearance during the first act ultimately meant exceedingly little to the film’s general themes, narrative, and settings, as Bindi appears more concerned with delivering its over-the-top brand of humor at this point than any signs of proper character and worldbuilding. The film, therefore, attempts to resolve any potential conflicts through overloaded stunts and gags that render these characters as one-dimensional comedic relief tools.
The performances unfortunately also couldn’t save Bindi from its pit of mediocrity. Although Bharath’s performance as a ghost is ultimately bearable enough and it’s interesting to see him playing a woman, his embodiment as a struggling college student is so bland and tasteless that it leaves impressions at all. The rest of the cast similarly follows; Srushti Dange only has a few scenes at the beginning of the film and has not much to offer. Sayaji Shinde’s performance as the villain is completely overshadowed by Namitha, who was able to showcase some of her acting range as the ruthless witch in the film.
Though Bindi is advertised as a horror comedy, the film is barely ever scary or actually funny. It is over-the-top and dramatic, annoying, and most exhausting. There are so far few silver linings in-betweens that it is almost pointless to see them as any sort of redeeming qualities as the film has already been a complete trainwreck from the beginning.
