Crew
Director/Screenplay – Krishnadev Yagnik, Based on a Concept by Chetan Daiya, Producers – Kalpesh K. Soni & Krunal Soni, Photography – Pratik Parmar, Music – Kedar and Bhargav, Visual Effects – Katalyst Creates, Visual Effects Supervisor – Asit Choudhary, Special Effects – Rain Team, Production Design – Shourya-Dexter. Production Company – Big Box Series.
Cast
Hiten Kumar (Pratap), Janki Bodiwala (Aarya), Hitu Kanodia (Atharva), Nilam Paanchal (Bina), Aaryan Sanghvi (Ansh)
Plot
The pilot Atharva takes his wife Bina, teenage daughter Aarya and younger son Ansh away for a holiday at their home in the countryside. While they stop at a roadside eatery, Atharva lacks the right change, but a stranger Pratap steps up and offers to pay. Pratap then comes over and joins them. Aarya is being picky over what she eats but Pratap gives her a sugar cube and after eating it, Aarya docilely eats the rest of her meal. After arriving at their home and settling in, they are surprised to find Pratap outside, saying his car has broken down. They invite him in. Once there, he proves to have an alarming control over Aarya who does whatever he tells her to, including slapping her brother on his command and dancing for three hours non-stop. Pratap then insists that he is going to take Aarya away with him. When Atharva and Bina react in horror, Pratap keeps forcing Aarya to do more extreme things, including ordering her to kill her brother unless they agree to his demands.
India has the largest filmmaking community in the world. It is the home of Bollywood, which serves the Hindi-speaking community, but there are also other different filmmaking cultures for other language and ethnic communities. Vash was one such, made in Gujarat, the Westernmost state of India with a population of around 60 million, whose cinema is colloquially referred to as Dhollywood.
Vash falls into the mini-genre of what I call Mysterious Stranger films. This began with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), which featured Terence Stamp as a mysterious stranger who inserted himself into an upper-class Italian household, seduced everybody, male and female alike, and where, after leaving, his absence proved so traumatic that all of them were driven to extreme lengths. Since then, there have been a number of other mysterious visitor films with the likes of The Shout (1978), Brimstone and Treacle (1982), Man Facing Southeast (1986), That Eye, The Sky (1994), The End of the Animal (2010), Blood River (2009), The Final Storm (2010), Outside Satan (2011), Borgman (2013) and Let Us Prey (2014), which frequently vie with an ambiguity between whether the stranger is angel or devil.
There seems something off about Hiten Kumar’s Pratap from the moment he is introduced. We see innocuous things like he asking to sit beside the teenage daughter Janki Bodiwala and offering her a sugar treat and then she calmly taking up his suggestion to eat the food she has rejected as being too oily. Not long after, he approaches the car and gives her a packet of biscuits, telling her not to eat them until she gets home, which we then see her doing in the back of the car parked in the driveway after everybody had gotten out. The scenes are low key and minor but something clearly seems off even if you can’t pinpoint what.
It is when Hiten enters the house that things get stranger, he at first maintaining his car has broken down, but then telling Janki to go and slap her brother Aaryan Sanghvi because his ball keeps bouncing into the house and interrupting them. From there, things become increasingly more disturbed as Hiten announces to the parents his intentions to take Janki away and then demonstrates it by ordering her to laugh and cry on command, attack her father, dance non-stop for three hours, and eat raw tea leaves, even to kill her parents if they come anywhere near or try to talk to her while he naps on the couch.
Vash becomes quite a terrifying work as we watch Hitem keep piling pressure onto the family via his control of Janki until they are bereft and begging him to spare them, which only causes him to torment them even further. There is something genuinely horrible to the scenes where he orders Janki to kill her younger brother and we see her pursuing him around the house with murderous intent, followed by the parents sobbing as they agree to surrender Janki to him. The film does arrive at a comeuppance and quite a nasty turning of the tables.
The interesting thing about Vash is that it never explains how Hiten Kumar manages to assert control over Janki Bodiwala and others. The only clue seems to be in the opening title cards where it is explained that “the filmmakers do not support and strongly condemn any kind of black magic, superstitious power, witchcraft and sorcery.” Without the benefit of that, all you have is a film about a stranger who exerts a mysterious control over a girl after giving her a sugar cube.
Vash Level 2 (2025) was a sequel.
Trailer here