One night, after peeing in the bushes, he gets bit in the butt by a werewolf. As the logic goes, you are what you are eaten by, and Bhaskar becomes a werewolf, too. The gifted, show-stealing Abhishek Banerjee plays his IAS aspiring cousin who bunches with him into “the North-East” and Paalin Kabak tags along as Bhaskar’s “local friend”. Together, this allows for what Amar Kaushik sketches best, bumbling male friendship. It does not have that three-way bite of Stree because there, all three seemed to be on equal footing — just as willing to being the butt of a joke as they are the butt of a gun stabbing someone in the face. You can see how in the travel song in Bhediya, ‘Baaki Sab Theek’, the reach is exceeding the grasp, and that charm is what they are after, even if it isn’t what they ultimately get.
The women are best left unaccounted for there Kriti Sanon who plays a vet, and is mysterious for sly, but honestly, quite silly, narrative reasons. You wonder why no one in the film asks who she is and where she comes from. Not even Bhaskar, who seems smitten. Is this because it’s all men? The film allows for love between them in the most lazy, fatiguing, commercially safe manner. She takes him to a place that is close to her heart. It is a CGI cliff, bursting with neon flowers. In a world like Arunachal Pradesh prized for its natural beauty, the audacity for visual effects? All desire then is, instead, located in our relationship with the body of Bhaskar, or well, Varun Dhawan.
Rarely has a film rationalized the beauty of its male body with such salivating, tongue wagging, horny logic. Bhaskar, overnight, inherits the body of sculpted granite from being bitten by the werewolf. Looking at the mirror, he marvels as we do. He is as thankful as we are. In one of the most rippling and tumultuous scenes, right before we cut to interval, in a long shot we see Bhaskar becoming the werewolf, the camera leering, his shirt being ripped apart, his bones reorienting, his spine rejecting evolution to slouch on all fours, the bush of hair, the tail tearing forth from the posterior fabric of his boxers. The body is paid such careful attention, it is as though we have come for a collective randy pilgrimage. In another scene, there is a literal snake in Bhaskar’s pants — and I have to say literal because there is enough evidence of metaphoric snakes throbbing conspicuously inside gray sweatpants and boxers throughout the film. As the snake, the literal snake, meanders her way up his body, the camera is looking down from over Dhawan’s shoulder, making clear the gap between the boxer and his skin, almost inviting us, seated silly in 3D glasses to shift a little and peer in, as though looking over a balcony. Imagine a film that requires, by logic, its male protagonist to walk around the city naked, barely clothed, or at other times tied by chains in his own home as he tires away, shirtless?
