Crew
Director – Amar Kaushik, Screenplay – Raj & DK, Dialogue Writer – Sumit Arora, Producers – DK, Raj & Dinesh Vijan, Photography – Amalendu Chaudhary, Music – Sachin-Jigar, Background Score – Ketan Sodha, Lyrics – Badshah, Jigar Sariya & Vayu, Visual Effects – Prime Focus Ltd. (Supervisor – Susheel Peris), Production Design – Madhusudan N., Action Directors – Amin Khatib & Manohar Verma. Production Company – Maddock Films/D2R Films.
Cast
Rajkumar Rao (Vicky), Shraddha Kapoor (Girl With No Name), Pankaj Tripathi (Brother Rudra), Aparshakti Khurana (Bittu), Atul Srivastav (Vicky’s Father), Abhishek Banerjee (Jana), Flora Saini (Stree), Sunita Rajwar (Jana’s Mother), Aakash Dabhade (Narenda), Vijay Raaz (Shankar Shastri)
Plot
It is the festival in the city of Chanderi. A local folklore says that a ghost called Stree will wander the streets and claim any man who is on his own during the festival. People paint the phrase “O Stree come tomorrow” on their houses and this supposedly banishes the Stree. Vicky is an expert women’s tailor and dismisses belief in the Stree. He then meets a mystery woman who asks him to make her a dress and he is attracted to her. During the festival, Vicky’s friend Jana is snatched by the Stree. Vicky’s friends try to convince him that the mystery woman, who has never given her name, may well be the Stree.
The stree is a folk legend from the Karnataka state in Southwestern India. According to the legend, people write “naale bae” (meaning “come tomorrow”) on doorways and walls of their homes, which is said to banish the stree, a malevolent witch that comes to steal children away. This is a film based on the legend of the Stree. It seems clearly to be one that director Amar Kaushik is not taking too seriously as witness the opening credit “Based on a Ridiculous True Phenomenon.”
From such an opening credit, I expected a comedic playing – and a lot of the comments I read around the web call Stree a Horror Comedy. However, I could detect no comedy element in the film as I watched, unless it is some of the complications around Rajkumar Rao’s romantic quandaries. (I am fully willing to consider that the comedy element could well be local in nature and/or that it may have gone over my head due to reading the film through subtitles).
It also may be differing film-making sensibilities between Bollywood and the primarily US equivalents, but I did feel that Stree was lightweight when it came to the horror element. There is a ghost-like figure that appears but things never too much more scary than say your average Goosebumps or Ghostbusters work. There’s even a lack of the more visceral horror elements that other Bollywood films such as Raat (1992), Bhoot (2003) and Tumbbad (2018) have been willing to go for.
If Stree were a Hollywood film, you also can help but think that the 128-minute running time would end up being cut down to around 90 minutes or less (although at least here we only get a single typical Bollywood musical number). Aside from the opening scene and the one at the party, there is not much horror in the first hour. These sections focus on Rajkumar Rao’s Vicky and his romance with Shraddha Kapoor as the Girl With No Name, before he is convinced that maybe she is the Stree. A Hollywood film would probably strip the first hour or so down to only around 15-20 minutes max.
Things pick up after that point. The film awkwardly introduces a Chosen One plot in about its last quarter, although these sections do at least take Stree more in the direction of the horror film that it has promised to be. However, this does introduce what is one of the great problems of the script – the characterisation of the Girl With No Name. [PLOT SPOILERS] We are made to think she might be the Stree with her lack of name, mysterious ability to turn up and her requests for what seem to be items to go into a stereotypical witch’s cauldron. However, the girl then reveals that she has been fighting to banish the Stree for several years whereupon she and Rajkumar Rao combine forces to exorcise the Stree and rescue his friend. She is the one who goes in with Rajkumar Rao to confront the Stree and ends up fighting against it with him at the end. However, the film then ends up with a twist final scene that reveals that this is not the case and that the Girl With No Name is the Stree after all. This makes no sense as a twist – why would she end up aiding the group to banish the Stree if she was the Stree? How, for that matter, can she and the Stree be together in the same place, fighting one another?
Stree was a popular hit. Director Amar Kaushik next borrowed a leaf from James Wan and The Conjuring (2013) and sequels and created a shared universe where he crossed it over with the subsequent horror film Bhediya (2022), followed by Munjya (2024). Stree 2 (2024) was a sequel.
Trailer here