‘Bhediya’ Review: Bollywood Werewolf Comedy Delivers a Strong Environmental Message

 ‘Bhediya’ Review: Overlong Bollywood Werewolf Comedy Delivers Powerful Environmental Message

Comedy horror has captivated Indian audiences since the early 2000s with more than 100 released films of this genre. Bollywood's first creature comedy, Amar Kaushik's "Bhediya" (literally "Wolf"), despite its harsh length, is a wildly entertaining rampage through the jungles of Northeast India that conveys pro-environmental and anti-racist messages, and also has the potential to become a franchise.

Mainstream Bollywood star Varun Dhawan plays Bhaskar, an ambitious

Delhi road worker who has mortgaged his family's home to secure a contract to build a highway through the dense jungle of Arunachal Pradesh in north-eastern India borders Porcelana. He is joined by his cousin Janardhan (Abhishek Banerjee) and assisted by locals Jomin (Paalin Kabaak) and Panda (Deepak Dobriyal). The problem is that you have to get permission from the villagers.

Village elders protest but Bhaskar convinces youth that they need malls and 'Netflix, not nature'. With the help of corrupt local officials, he manages to collect enough signatures to seal the deal.

To make matters worse, Bhaskar was badly bitten on the butt by a wolf and is being treated by veterinarian Anika (Kriti Sanon). The wound heals too quickly and Bhaskar turns into a werewolf at night, taking down the officials who approved Project

Freeway one by one. Panda begs a 120-year-old shaman to turn Bhaskar back into a human, but the local police and militia are determined to hunt down both Bhaskar's werewolf and the wolf that bit him.

With this, his third film, Kaushik has established a tradition of delivering powerful social messages through a massive entertainment package. Her debut horror comedy Stree (2018) was a feminist fable, while Bala (2019) was about hair loss and pubic hump. In “Bhediya,” the main message is to save the environment, and the other Indian practice denounced is the habit of pejoratively describing people in the Northeast as Chinese, a casual racism widespread in the rest of the country. The messages are to the point without any subtlety, but that's usually the best way to get them across to a mass audience, and Kaushik and his writer Niren Bhatt handle it effectively.

The accent on "Bhediya" is more on the Comedy often more youthful and sometimes more scatological than the creatures

When the creatures emerge, it's a triumph of world-class visual effects, executed by the team that also worked on the blockbuster RRR at London's Motion Picture Co. The performances are excellent throughout, with Dhawan and Sanon carrying the film with ease, but the standout is Banerjee, an actor who can play bumbling psychos and comics with equal joy and opportunity.

Running over two and a half hours, the film surpasses its welcome, reinforced by  traditional Bollywood speed-breakers of song and dance and romantic interludes that periodically interrupt the action of the werewolf tale. There are a couple of MCU-esque easter eggs above the  credits and the second one places "Bhediya" squarely in the "Stree" universe. Surely a franchise catches your eye.