POLTERHEIST: Leaves A Bad Taste In Your Mouth For All The Wrong Reasons

Polterheist starts in exactly the way a comedy shouldn’t: with a murder. The murder isn’t the problem – it’s the way the murder is handled. It’s more like a scene from Reservoir Dogs, if the budget for that film had been considerably smaller and a considerably less talented filmmaker at the helm.

The reason this man is being tortured, then murdered, is because he might know something about the death of a man who owes the torturer, a drug dealer called Uday (Pushpinder Chani), some money. The protagonists of the story, Tariq (Sid Akbar Ali) and Boxy (Jamie Cymbal), have a relationship to Uday which is unclear, but they’re the ones who murdered Frank.

Since being dead prevents Frank from forking it over, the burden falls on them. At a loss, they enlist the services of someone who claims to be a psychic, a woman who serves a very similar purpose to Christopher Walkens’ character in The Dead Zone. She can do and see stuff the protagonists can’t, resulting in some not-so-divine intervention which might just save their lives.

Independent Film is important – but not when it’s like this

Before I get properly into this review, I feel like I should say that I understand the importance of independent, low-budget cinema. It allows for creativity that the studio system won’t invest in for fear of not seeing a financial return. But aside from creative freedom and financial concerns, independent cinema allows for different stories to be told, which aren’t often seen on the silver screen.

Unfortunately, Polterheist will never be the poster child for the Independent Cinema movement. It’s a story which has been done to death at this point, and how badly it’s done. This is a film with very few redemptive features, neither creatively nor thematically. The film industry is trying to distance itself from all of the content in Polterheist, which makes the film seem as if it was unearthed from a 1950s-era time capsule in which the politics hadn’t yet progressed to the modern days.

These problems all begin (but certainly do not end) with the protagonist of the story. Believe it or not, Uday does have some character development. He’s not just one kind of bad, he’s two. There’s a vague hint that he’s involved in the prostitution business (definitely as a customer, possibly as a proprietor), and we know this because director David Gilbank has chosen to have semi-dressed women surrounding him in nearly every scene in which he’s included. They have no lines in the script, and these characters have no purpose beyond the logistics of showing who Uday is. Using characters as window-dressing is not something a director with any kind of vision would do.

That’s ultimately the problem with Polterheist. It’s a film which revels in its obscenity, and it often feels like David Gilbank was trying to be offensive, imbuing the film with as much shock value as possible, like a poor man’s Quentin Tarantino.

Bigotry disguised as humour

There’s a whole scene about Uday having to give his Uncle five million worth of diamonds so he doesn’t have to marry his daughter (Uday doesn’t want to marry her, because she’s “ugly”, apparently). That’s not all: the scene is marred by some very flagrant and unpleasant racism.

In the second half of the film, David Gilbank ratchets up the offensiveness again. Through very complicated plot mechanics, the two main characters talk about people having sex, which leads to a scene so homophobic, it’s amazing that it didn’t end up on the cutting room floor. It’s the kind of thing which would be the subject of endless sociology university essays, had more people seen the film.

In terms of its narrative, Polterheist is all over the place. It starts off as a buddy crime caper, then turns into a supernatural thriller, then a soap-opera style drama about infidelity, with a horror-comedy thread running throughout. The result is a film that appears to have a script which was written during production, with completely inexplicable plot revelations that are paired with paper-thin characters, and whole scenes which add nothing at all to the story.

They’re scenes which have to be seen to be believed. There’s one in which a man complains that he and his friends were attacked by two groups of gangsters to a rival mob-boss, who then tells a joke he heard about a man stranded on a desert island taking viagra and having sex with coconuts and animals. It’s like a scene from Inland Empire, but  from an alternative universe in which David Lynch didn’t know how to capture the queasy and unsettling atmosphere he’s famous for.

You’d think with all of this stuff going on, Polterheist would be interesting in a how-bad-can-it-get kind of way, but it never is. Even though some of the scenes are so bizarre, or so badly filmed (there’s one in particular which involves a lot of incredibly fake-looking vomit), they’re all incredibly plodding, and despite all of the wacky situations the characters get into, the film doesn’t have chance to run out of steam because it starts with none at all.

Polterheist: Conclusion

Polterheist is shorter than ninety minutes, but feels like it lasts one hundred and ninety. Of those ninety minutes, I’d say less than half of the scenes progress the plot in any significant way, and some of them seem to be out-takes from different films, in that their content relates to the main plot of Polterheist in no way. Perhaps I’d be more kind to the film if it wasn’t so offensive, and it didn’t show so much disdain for so many marginalized groups of people. There’s a tendency for people to seek out films like Polterheist just to see how bad they are, but believe me, it’s not worth it, not even for that reason.

Have you seen Polterheist? What did you think? Let us know in the comments below!

Polterheist was released in the UK on September 30, 2018. For all international release dates, see here.