Too often reviewers, especially us of the kvlt persuasion, tend to be a tad too harsh on something that peters out after showing signs of promise. I'm going to waive that for 13B, a film that gets so much right and for such a long time that the silly twist ending and a large, unnecessary chunk of exposition pale into insignificance.

Manohar (Madhavan) and his family move into the titular flat 13B and almost immediately things begin to go askew. The milk splits every day, the photos in the puja room remain impervious to any attempts at being put up on its walls, and Manohar is forced to take the stairs by a lift that refuses to work for him (not a bad thing at all considering his rather tubby physique). More significantly, the women of the house get hooked to a soap opera that mirrors and predicts events in their own lives to an uncanny extent. Only Manohar and his inspector friend notice this (which makes the women seem almost imbecilic in their inability to make some fairly obvious connections).

However this plot device drives one of the most compelling narratives in recent years - a genuinely weird tale of the supernatural and brutal murder laced with some wicked black humour. There are scenes of a disturbing visceral intensity in this film that are at quite a different level from anything we have seen in Indian cinema. Frankly, I wish someone would strap Ram Gopal Varma to a chair and force him to watch this film Ludovico Technique Style, just to tell him "Fucker, this is how it's done. If you can't do it at least this well, don't bother." The approach to scares is genuine; not some random cocktease that ends with the camera panning to the face of a doll or the close-up of a ceramic monkey's ass.

13B doesn't seem to have been made on too lavish a budget and its real strength is its script (also credited to Vikram Kumar). If this is in fact an original story and not inspired by or loosely adapted from some (possibly South Asian) horror flick, Kumar is set to be one of the most inspired and audacious scriptwriters in India. It's not perfect - there are a couple of terrible songs and the background music can get rather distracting. But its a fantastic film in any case, imminently worth watching. I'd reccomend you hurry if you want to see it on screen because it feels like another of those one-week-only flicks.