CAST: Shantanu Maheshwari, Tanya Maniktala, Sikandar Kher, Adil Hussain Revathi, Saswata Chatterjee, Tillotama Shome, Kharaj Mukherjee, Anish Railkar, Barun Chanda
DIRECTOR: Pratim D. Gupta
At a bar, a woman asks a guy she just meets to go back to his hotel room. But she’s not just any woman: Rumi (Tanya Maniktala) is a vampire, and a rebellious one at that. While the vampires that reside in Kolkata are supposed to remain deep underground, Rumi goes “Upar” on the regular, looking for fresh blood. Today, she’s brought along Sreela (Anindita Bose), who is going “upar” for the first time. Rumi tells Sreela that the threat that they’ll be decapitated by the Cutmundus is overblown; that legend has to be at least 50 years old, and the humans that are part of the Cutmundus are all likely dead.
When they go back underground, they need to avoid the wrath of the community’s human leader, AD (Adil Hussain), who has threatened that he will wake up a supreme vampire named Ora (Anish Railkar), who will mete out severe punishment to anyone who goes above ground.
Meanwhile, Roy (Shantanu Maheshwari), a shy dentist who does cooking videos on the side, is resistant to being set up by his parents. One arranged date goes extraordinarily poorly, but he still agrees to accompany her to a dance party in Chinatown the next day. Rumi is also there, and she observes Roy mixing a drink for the bartender as his date dances with her boyfriend.
Rumi is out for blood again, but when she invites a man to an empty restaurant, something goes wrong when she bites his neck. She hits something hard, and one of her canines breaks and falls to the floor. Some of her blood mixes with his, a no-no since one of the unspoken rules to going Upar is to not convert humans into vampires.
Meanwhile, the man who was bitten goes to the cops, who almost laugh him out of the room. They hand him over to Inspector Kartik Pal (Sikandar Kher), who has investigated supernatural claims in the past. He’s the laughingstock of the district, but Pal — whose senile father tells the neighborhood children ghost tales — takes the man’s report seriously.
After consulting a displaced vampire about her tooth, Rumi finds herself in Roy’s office, right as he’s making a cooking video. When he goes to fix her broken canine, with the wiggly nerve, he accidentally pricks his finger. The drop of blood falls into Rumi’s mouth and is more satisfying than the pints she’s guzzled from others, but Roy passes out. She wakes him up and tells him she’ll be back. But she can’t be without her canine for much longer — and her trips Upar are getting riskier, as AD is closer to finding out.
The vampires in Tooth Pari hew too closely to the western playbook, from skin that singes in sunlight to fangs that retract and extend at will.
Rumi isn’t supposed to be among the humans at all, and every time she goes above ground she risks being found out and decapitated. In the last 50 years, the vampire population under Kolkata has stayed very small, and every time she’s absent, the more chance there is that she’ll be found out.
But the draw of being with Roy, especially his invigorating blood, is going to be too strong for Rumi to ignore. And considering that all Roy wants is to date someone that he has things in common with, this should be an funny and interesting romance to follow.
With so many amazing actors under one banner- what went wrong with the narrative ?
Adil Hussain, hidden in a white wig, seems grateful for the disguise. Tillotama Shome appears to be trying out for comic con in Madhuri Dixit cosplay. There is a one-scene Danish Husain to a blink-and-miss Kharaj Mukherjee. Overall- long – pointless and not so much fun. Sikandar Kher stands out.
Streams on Netflix
