There is very little reason why we should sit through this blindly fallacious fear fare called Evil Eye which is backed by Priyanka Chopra's Purple Pebble. Yes, there is one good performance. And it’s always a pleasure to watch Sarita Choudhury ever since she made her memorable debut opposite, ahem, Denzel Washington in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991). We don’t see her often enough. But if this is the kind of cinema we get to see her in then we might as well not see her.
The evil in Evil Eye is such a dispensable imposition that we are left looking at a plot that seems to have been written with the sole purpose of making supernaturalism look cool. Regrettably, the eerie twist at the end is anything but convincing, let alone credible. The story works better as a mother-daughter drama with the mother in Delhi becoming progressively paranoid about her daughter’s marriage to a “suitable match” in the US.
Here again, there is a problem of perception, as Sarita Choudhury and her screen-daughter played by Sunita Mani look nothing like mother and daughter. This is in keeping with the equation evident in the other relationships: Ms. Choudhury and her screen-husband (Bernard White) don’t look like a couple and Ms. Mani and her boyfriend (Omar Maskati) are shown faking the bonhomie until it hurts.
The focus is on the emotional dynamics of the mother-daughter duo. The two actors struggle with their lines during the telephonic conversation like actors rehearsing for an online series on coping with COVID-19.