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Bollywood actors Sonakshi Sinha and Saqib Saleem on horror-comedy 'Kakuda'

Sinha returns to the role of girl next door in spooky movie

It’s been a while since Sonakshi Sinha played the girl next door, and she’s happy to return to the mould for the movie Kakuda, out now on Zee5 Global.

“I think I was playing a girl next door after a long time,” she laughs over a Zoom call with City Times. “So, I appreciated the break from you know, all these very hectic and powerful characters.”

Sinha was last seen in the Sanjay Leela Bhansali epic Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar, where she played a double role, of a cunning yet empathetic woman called Fareedan and her mother, Rehana.

However, the recently married Sinha doesn’t really take the weak damsel in distress route in this movie either. She says of her character Indira, “She is a strong girl, she's someone who doesn't believe in superstitions and ghosts. And, you know, the couple is newly married, and she will go to any lengths to sort of get her husband out of the situation that he's gotten himself into. I [think] that sounds reasonable.”

In the movie, which belongs to the horror-comedy genre, Sinha plays twin sisters, Indira and Gomati. Set in Rathodi, Uttar Pradesh, the premise is that the village is cursed. Each house has two doors (one normal sized and one small) and on Tuesdays at 7.15, the smaller door must be opened by the men of the house. If it isn’t, the male will develop a hunchback for 13 days before dying. Much in the vein of Rajkummar Rao’s 2018 horror comedy Stree, the sprit attached to the village targets only men. This apparition is known as Kakuda.

Spoke in the wheel

When Indira falls in love and marries Sunny (played by Saqib Saleem, whose credits include Dobaara: See Your Evil and Race 3), he is unable to get home in time to open the door. The result is – yes, that’s right – a hump on his back and the promise of death. As the tale unwinds, we also meet a ‘ghost hunter’ (a highly tattooed Riteish Deshmukh), who is in the business of helping spirits cross over.

And so begins a game of cat-and-mouse, with the couple and their friends trying to find a way to deal with Kakuda before Sunny’s 13 days are done.

Straddling two genres is never easy, especially in the case of horror-comedy where punchlines can take on a caricature-like quality, which can feel forced. “I think it was just so well sketched out for us and our director, [Aditya] Sarpotdar, he's got such a stronghold of this genre, we just had a really good time shooting for it, because all the thrills, all the tools, all the laughs, everything was in its right place. And we as actors just had to go and sort of execute that. So it was really fun to be a part of something like this.”

Saleem concurs. “We have great material to play with. And we just tried to be honest and true to that. When you're doing a comedy film, the situation is comedic. So, I think the material really helped us,” he explains on a Zoom call.

Learning how to speak

That’s not to say that the cast didn’t need to do any prep work. “I feel like if there is there was a lot of prep for the film. There is a different dialect [which] all of us [had to learn how to speak]. There's a bit of a physicality that I need to go through the film. But besides that, because it's a comedy film [things depend on] timing. We tried to do a lot of readings, but then they also didn't want to overdo it because that would also kill the spontaneity of the comedy,” he says.

As for how he chose the script, the actor says: “[For] Kakuda, the script came to me in the evening, I read it in the night, I met Aditya next day for lunch, then I spoke to Sonakshi in the afternoon, and in the evening, I was only to do the film. Sometimes you just read the material. And you know, this will be fun to do.”

For Sinha, on the other hand, movie choices seem to demand variety. No wonder her career trajectory has seen her play everyone from a misunderstood delinquent in the action film Akira (back in 2016) to a doctor wannabe in comedy Khandaani Shafakhana (2019) and a plotting nautch girl in the drama Heeramandi. “I think I am just looking for good roles at this point, really. And I've been consciously trying to do that for a while now. I do jump from genre to genre, but I really enjoy that I enjoy playing drastically different characters from what I've done before… that's always going to be a conscious effort, because that's what keeps me engaged as an actor.”

And so, she’s back to the role of the girl next door – albeit one with a ghost at her back.

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