Zee5’s Aafat E Ishq Review: Out of the Norm but Too Long

Aafat e Ishq is a horror-comedy movie directed by Indrajit Nattoji, starring Neha Sharma, Ila Arun, Namit Das, and Amit Sial, alongside other cast members. The movie is 114 minutes long.

Zee5 describes the film as:

This ZEE5 Original film revolves around Lallo, a 30-year-old recluse woman who yearns for love. She works as a caretaker, and her life changes when she inherits her employer’s property.

– Aafat e Ishq review does not contain spoilers –

Aafat e Ishq starts off interestingly – with a traumatized woman (or is it a woman?) and then we shift to a haunted house… well, before the house got haunted. There’s Lallo, the orphan caretaker of a paralysed woman. When the latter dies, she inherits her home and that is, obviously, where the problems start.

The film won’t inherently make you roll on the floor laughing. However, there’s something very humorous about it. Aafat e Ishq has undertones of something sinister when it starts off and you kind of get an idea of where it might head to when you meet Lallo. Then there’s Namit Das, whose character just shimmies and laughs.

Lallo loves books and that’s probably where all her problems lie. The movie tells us these stories in great detail, using graphics and a voiceover. The context is necessary, but the film takes entirely too long to get to the point. We follow Lallo doing the most mundane things – they are funny but are mundane nonetheless. They are also not funny after a point.

Take for example Pratap. He’s such a stereotypical techie character who sits in his dark and dingy room and eats like a complete maniac. He also has no social skills. Not all nerds are like that, and I am tired of them being represented like that. I mean, this man is a beast, come on. The film tries to portray this as a funny incident, but really, it’s a bit tacky.

As people start dropping like flies around Lallo, it gets a bit tiring to watch. As I said earlier, Aafat e Ishq takes so much time to get to the point. With its huge runtime, I wish they could’ve cut back on some of the unnecessary things to bring down the runtime and make it tighter. After a while, you just watch Lallo’s everyday problems instead of getting to the point of the story.

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That being said, Aafat e Ishq, through its comedy, makes us forget that we’re watching a horror movie. Her loneliness and need to find someone in her life is boiling over, but you don’t make the connection to it until a chunk of the runtime has passed. It’s a nice revelation, but to be honest, it’s just so time-consuming to get to it that you lose all interest to find it out.

There’s a social message in Aafat e Ishq somewhere, but getting to that message, again, is so time-consuming that it’s difficult to sit through. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad movie, but it’s too long. There’s entirely too much attention given to secondary plots and uninteresting dialogue that drags for too long. However, the twist ending comes out of nowhere and is nice as heck though the animation is a bit wonky.

Neha Sharma and Namit Das are great. Das, especially, is always great to watch as always. Sharma, too, does a great job and is consistent throughout.

Summing up: Aafat e Ishq

Aafat e Ishq is a quirky horror-comedy that tries its best to break the monotony that is Hindi horror cinema. It’s not as good as Stree, which shines due to tight script, hilarious moments and glaring social message, but it’s something out of the ordinary for sure. I just wish that it was shorter than it is, the unnecessary scenes are just too much to take.

Aafat-e-Ishq is streaming on Zee5.

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