‘Stree 2’ review: Chanderi gang is still a great hang

In Stree, the small town of Chanderi is haunted by a female demon who only targets men. In Amar Kaushik’s sequel to his 2018 horror-comedy, the situation is reversed. The demon this time is male; his victims are women, the independent kind. This new scenario doesn’t have the same bite. A town with women who can wander after dark without fear of harm or male censure is satire. A town with women persecuted for wanting basic freedoms is just India.  

Nevertheless, Stree 2 is one of the most enjoyable Hindi films I’ve seen this year. Though I liked the first film, and Kaushik’s second film in the same ‘universe’, Bhediya (2022), I was skeptical going in that this would match up. We don’t do sequels well, I told myself, and it’s been a while since Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi or Shraddha Kapoor have done anything exciting. But the packed Independence Day eve hall was clearly there for a good time, and I found my defenses melting when Kaushik dumps a whole lot of exposition into a Ramleela-style stage production summing up the events of the first film. By the time an immaculately stupid Disha Patani joke was tossed out, I was laughing as hard as everyone else.

Kaushik has tapped into homegrown horror traditions (an avenging witch in Stree; a tree sprite in Munjya, a 2024 sleeper hit he produced) but also Hollywood-derived ones (werewolves in Bhediya). Stree 2 also uses a foreign prototype for its monster—the headless horseman from ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. But Kaushik innovates by jettisoning the horse and having ‘Sarkata’ carry his severed head around. In addition, the head—a lurid, grinning mug with bulging eyes straight out of Aahat—can fly around, scouting for victims and attacking them. 

It starts with Rudra (Tripathi) receiving a few tattered pages in the post about a village legend involving a beheaded man. Then the pampered, protein shake-drinking girlfriend of Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana) is kidnapped from her bed. Other single women in the town have gone missing too, and so the old gang assembles to fight another monster. After his possession in Stree and a traumatic vacation in Bhediya, Jana (Abhishek Banerjee) has tried to put some distance between himself and Chanderi, but is dragged back from Delhi. Vicky (Rao), still a virgin mooning over the mysterious spirit (Kapoor) who stole his heart and then vanished, is asked to take the lead, given his somewhat undeserved reputation as a demonslayer.

Amar Kaushik’s comedies proceed at a Hawksian pace; I found myself missing jokes because I was still laughing at earlier ones. He slips in lines that wouldn’t work if they were delivered slower; when Kapoor’s ghost girl turns up, an overjoyed Vicky blurts, “Tumhe kitna yaad kiya… dil se, haath se” (I thought about you constantly… with my heart, my hand). These are also great hangout films. I could spend hours just listening to Vicky and Bittu lob insults at each other and watching Rudra behave like a calm Hindi dictionary, just like I sometimes wish Bhediya was two hours of Bhaskar, Jana and Jomin bickering and getting high in the forest. 

Like the exposition song at the start, Kaushik and writer Niren Bhatt, a frequent and key collaborator, find ways to deliver stock situations with a wink—or a touch of class. There’s a point in the second half when you know, even before you know, that an item number is coming. The film has already laid the groundwork with a stray mention of Shama. Now, Rudra takes the boys to meet her, to request her to dance (of course he calls it ‘nritya’) in a haunted town with a monster who abducts independent women. The scene is courtly and affecting, soundtracked with Pyar Diwana Hota Hai (“Shama kahe parwane se”), beautifully played by Tripathi, briefly transformed into a romantic hero. It lasts only a few minutes but shows how skillfully Kaushik can blend tones even while negotiating commercial imperatives.  

It doesn’t all land. When Sarkata turns the town’s men into patriarchal zombies, the film can’t find anything interesting to do with this; an overly conservative male population barely registers as satire. The big fight at the end with Vicky, the ghost, Sarkata and a few other monsters looks dreary and strains the CGI the longer it goes on. Rao is a less malleable actor than he was in 2018, though he’s still funny, never more so than when he sings Rema’s ‘Calm Down’ with his whole body while straddling a motorbike (Kapoor, as befits a ghost, leaves few traces of having been there).  

Unlike Stree and Bhediya, where the monsters turned out to be more poignant than despicable, this film wraps up conventionally. In what has become an unofficial theme for Hindi cinema this month, the last five minutes are given to franchise extension. I’d like to see Kaushik branch out, try his hand at something other than comedy. But there are worse fates than making pleasurable films about amiable idiots who are great company even when they’re running for their lives.