Like most horror movies, Shaitaan opens with a household that appears too glad for their very own good. When the Rishis — Kabir (Ajay Devgn) and Jyoti (Jyotika) with their youngsters Janvi (Janki Bodiwala) and Dhruv (Anngad Raaj) — cease at a roadside dhaba en path to their farmhouse, they run right into a gentleman who introduces himself as Vanraj (R. Madhavan) and buys them tea. Kabir is well trusting and invitations Vanraj to affix their desk. Jyoti is proven to be barely cautious of eating with a whole stranger. She is the one one who is instantly suspicious about Vanraj’s ostensible kindness and the best way he’s insinuating himself into their lives.
Thanks to the exceptional Jyotika, the mom within the household rapidly establishes herself as a putting and compelling character in Shaitaan. For the Hindi adaptation of the Gujarati movie Vash (2023), the writers cleverly carry collectively in Jyoti’s character two established female tropes to create a personality who’s each dynamic and complicated. Jyoti is, on one hand, the quintessential protecting mom, ever alert in terms of looking for her household. She’s the one who notices Vanraj lurking close to the Rishis’ automobile and speaking to Janvi when nobody else is round. On the opposite hand, she additionally embodies the suspicious, nagging spouse, which is often a destructive trope and used to evoke sympathy for the mild-mannered, henpecked husband. However, subsequent to a patriarch like Kabir, the trope loses its negativity and as a substitute affords a distinction that heightens the viewers’s consciousness to the eerie state of affairs wherein the Rishi household finds itself. She is the primary particular person to understand Vanraj has adopted them to their farmhouse underneath the pretext of charging his telephone. Kabir, nonetheless well mannered, affords Vanraj a seat, however Jyoti is fast to demand to her husband, “I need that man out of the house”, though on paper, Vanraj remains to be an harmless stranger.
Until the script inevitably pushes Jyoti to the sidelines, Jyotika shines on this function that reveals the mom because the extra perceptive and proactive mother or father, embodying a defiant power that may be a much-needed distinction to how Janvi, the opposite feminine character within the movie, is robbed of company and energy. Even when Jyoti is requested to make tea for his or her unwelcome visitor, she is stiff and curt with Vanraj, a far cry from the proper hostess. Her unease with Vanraj makes her one thing of a mirror for the viewers’s reactions as Shaitaan unfolds, validating our emotions when Vanraj drops the act to indicate his diabolical facet.
