Bhootnath

WHENI heard that Vivek Sharma’s Bhoothnath was about a ghost doing its darnedest to scare away the family that’s moved into its home, I was afraid we were in for a retread of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice – but, thankfully, the only Burtonian bit about this film is its No Smokingish credits sequence, where a candle is snuffed out and the names of the cast and crew are conjured up from the wisps of smoke that have apparently invaded the entire house.Strangely, though, that’s the only hint of the macabre, and what follows is a most sweet-natured fantasy for children.Except for the last half-hour or so – where the director appears to have realised there are grown-ups in the audience too, and in a desperate, last-minute attempt at throwing sops at them, he lets the free-floating whimsy curdle into tiresome melodrama – Bhoothnath is the kind of film you rarely ever see made here, where something like Koi... Mil Gaya or Krissh is what passes for children’s entertainment.