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Raat

1992

रात

The Sharma family re-locate to a semi-urban locality in a house that has a "reputation". The Sharma family consists of Mr. Sharma, his wife Shalini Sharma, only daughter Manisha Sharma or "Mini" as they affectionately call her; and their grandchild Bunty, as his parents had been killed in an accident. Strange things start happening, with a return of a dead kitten, and the brutal murder of Manisha's friend, Reshmi; an attempt to kill Mr. Sharma and Manisha's boyfriend, Deepak. What is the force behind these brutalities? Is it natural or supernatural?

Revathi Chinna Rohini Hattangadi Akash Khurana Om Puri Anant Nag Jaya Mathur Master Atit Tej Sapru Sunanda Nirmalamma C. V. L. Narasimha Rao

Alternative Titles

Raatri, Raat (1992), రాత్రి

Genres

Drama Horror Thriller

Theatrical

07 Feb 1992

IndiaA

India

07 Feb 1992

TheatricalA

127 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Freyr ★★★½ 1

Night #26 of Hooptober VII.
Confidently shot feature that seems to have a grasp on how investment in the characters goes a long way in telling a compelling story. While it does run a little longer than necessary, you get a nice sense of the family and friends, which makes it genuinely upsetting and shocking once the true horror kicks off. It does tend to imply more than it wants to show, at least until the nifty finale, but I wouldn't strictly call it a bad thing; I suppose given the age of the movie, I was expecting more focus on effects, but it felt more dramatic this way, to some extent. The horror being someone staring intensely at the camera does get a bit repetitive, but that's kind of the only major drawback in what I think was otherwise a quality exorcism flick.
Review by sydney ★★★

basically a rough draft of bhoot, with the seeds of some ideas about the terrors of becoming an adult and reaching out to bewildered men to save you, but most of this is just aimless chill, not exactly scary but atmospheric and unsettling, rgv is really good at making you feel like you're watching an evil presence watch the characters. lots of people think this is too long and boring i guess but i love it. it could have been even longer and boringer imo! and very pleased that om puri got the best moment in the whole movie. this is the type of movie that i could watch all day every day, i just want to see some haunted stuff and zone out.
Review by SubToretto ★★★

🎃Horrorthon 2023 - Day 43 - India-🎃
Two hours is not an exorbitant amount of time to build a spooky atmosphere, lace some scares in periodically, and engage us with characters and their relationships; leading to a horror-filled climax.
However, there does still need to be a deft hand in the structural editing of those elements; and here it really drags its feet for the first hour and then gets sporadically messy fore the next half.
It is attempting to build the characters and lay some of the spooky groundwork in the first half, but the horror is poorly defined and derivative of many other films. The characters are decent and well-acted, but we don’t get to see much development…
Review by More_Badass ★★★½

For about 75% of the runtime, or about 100 of its 127 minutes, I was totally invested in Ram Gopal Varma’s Raat. This haunted house tale thrives on subtlety and creepy implication: the ajar creak of a cabinet, ominous basement steps, a presence personified by Evil Dead-esque lurking camerawork; the nightmarish opening and an awesomely eerie sequence in a packed movie theater that becomes hauntingly empty in a single shot embody Raat’s tenor of scares. Obvious echoes of Poltergeist and The Exorcist, but just as much influence seems drawn from Carpenter’s unnerving urban spaces and perhaps from Japenese kaibyō eiga films. Lead actress Revathi effectively sells the turn from bubbly college-goer Mini to glassy-gaze cat-eye possessed.
Never going a few…
Review by MrGeekBoi ★★★★ 7

Although I could not find an English-subtitled version of this, I am learning to hone the ability to watch films in foreign languages and draw insight simply from the visuals alone.
This was an exuberant mish-mash of myriad horror films and tropes, ranging from Evil Dead and Hausu to The Exorcist, Phantasm, Halloween... it's a veritable who's who and smorgasbord of references and deep cuts for the most dedicated lovers of the weird and the gory, but interesting enough for thr casual viewer.
This developed a little slower than I expected, and wasn't quite as weird. But it did start with some good scares and had a nice balance of dramatic beats. The house in this was very modern and that kid looked like Deep Roy. I would let that kitty cat devour my soul.
Review by Sailesh Dahal ★★★ 2

Raat's story is clear-cut, uncomplicated, and predictable, but how it is told makes all the difference. Overall, the plot is predictable as I said, but it's a classic horror film with excellent sound effects, camera work, and jump scare moments and also some distinctive style of RGV.
Review by Jack Russo ★★

Possessed steadicam horror with a distinctly Italian sense for genre formalism and the far less overt essence of its hauntings, beholden to little more than raspy murmurings and oppressive unseen energies. That latter aura grasps at RGV's devotion to dramatic relationships like spectral hands reaching down from the ceiling to tear a family apart, as these tensions are measured in the abandon of social familiarity and the caustic glances that peer through that vacancy of others; a village in which no one is home to answer the door; a cinema entirely without an audience; a child talking to an empty chair in the basement. These implicit terrors conjure uneasy ambience until the occasion is pivoted like a snapped neck, turning into dull Exorcist-lite concerns which, the visceral reaction of one gloopy face melt aside, disengages from domestic disturbance for the middling mystic prophecies of a priest and a house from hell.
Review by anoopmama

This was dope. Prolly my favorite use of the POV shot in anything I’ve seen. Rgv really makes you feel like you are Spider-Man
Review by ry ★★★

we exorcisin on the mondrian bed tonight
Review by Tarun Nihariya ★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

SPOILERS FOR RAAT AND THE EXORCIST
I’ve seen my fair share of POV sequences—the one in Evil Dead is chaotic and over the top, immediately capturing the tone of those films; the one in Juraj Herz’s Beauty and the Beast features a careful & softer approach indicating a delicate balance between the titular characters; and the one in Halloween, accompanied by the heavy breaths of Myers, is creepy & unnerving—but never have I seen so many of them stuffed together like they are in RGV’s Raat. It’s like these shots are the whole film and its sole personality. I get it, I really do, but they are excessive, especially when there’s not much else going on in the film. A pot of…
Review by Nick ★★★½ 8

RGV taking all his favorite imported horror guns down to the range and firing them each for fifteen minutes to decide which ones he wants to master.
The whole thing is a lot of fun, but that stylistic roulette does lead to Raat having a bit less clarity of purpose than later efforts like Deyyam or Kaun?.
But it's still 90s RGV, so the floor is on the ceiling, and the ceiling's in the sky.
Revathi is also just unreal in this, carrying entire scenes with no lines and little motion, just a whole lot of face and eyes.
Score is excellent throughout as well, even if it does occasionally feel like it's picking Carpenter's pocket.
Review by Post1000Tension ★★★½

THE WHITE CAT (Argento/Fulci, 1992). Long but consistently unsettling, the inability to predict what happens next works very well in its favor. Amazing soundtrack, and great intro to Varma.

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Raat

रात

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Theatrical

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07 Feb 1992

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Raat

रात

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Theatrical

07 Feb 1992

India

07 Feb 1992

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