Almari Review: Nilay Shah's Wasted Wish-Granting Cupboard

The premise, as advertised, is simple enough. A family - led by Manasi (Jyotsana Rajpurohit) and Tanay (Mehool Desai) - discovers that an old, forgotten cupboard in their home possesses enchanting powers. What begins as wonder curdles quickly into obsession. Wishes come true, but so do consequences. Before long, a parade of outsiders - a magician (Jay Panchal), a stranger (Anil Modi), a pandit (Jayraj Freeman) and a shadowy figure named Yugam (Manish Vaghela) - are drawn to the household, each with his own designs on the cupboard and its magic.

It is a serviceable engine for a thriller. Desires breed vices, and vices breed foes; the cupboard becomes less a magical object than a mirror held up to everyone who touches it. That is the film Almari wants to be. That is not the film it is.

Shah's direction has ambition but no discipline. The screenplay, credited to the director, keeps introducing new characters and new rules for the cupboard without ever settling on a coherent internal logic. By the midway mark, the film is juggling so many agendas that it forgets to generate suspense. A thriller lives and dies on escalation, and Almari escalates only in volume. The dialogue aims for ominous and lands on vague; characters speak in riddles because the script has not worked out the answers.

The pacing is the film's most punishing flaw. At 140 minutes, it feels considerably longer. Entire stretches are devoted to characters wandering corridors, staring at the cupboard, or delivering exposition that contradicts something said twenty minutes earlier. The vices that supposedly tempt this family are gestured at rather than dramatised - greed, envy, lust for power - so when the inevitable unraveling comes, it carries no weight. We have not been given a reason to care about these people before their lives spiral; we are only told that they do.

And yet, there are flashes. The production design gives the cupboard a genuinely uncanny presence - heavy, ornate, slightly wrong in its proportions - and Shah knows how to frame it. A few sequences in the first act, before the plot congeals, suggest the lean, nasty little thriller this could have been. The sound design, too, does heavy lifting in scenes the writing abandons.

Among the cast, Jyotsana Rajpurohit fares best, grounding Manasi's descent into desire with a quiet desperation that the script scarcely deserves. Mehool Desai is earnest but underserved. Jay Panchal's magician is the film's most interesting creation - theatrical, menacing, ambiguous - but he vanishes for long stretches, and the movie loses its pulse whenever he does. The supporting players, including Sandeep Prajapati, Chetan Padhiyar and Anil Modi, are given almost nothing to work with beyond reacting.

Note the TMDb rating of 0/10 reflects an absence of audience votes rather than a verdict. Consider this review that verdict instead.

Pros

• A genuinely intriguing premise with real genre potential
• Committed work from Jyotsana Rajpurohit and Jay Panchal
• Striking production design and a memorable central prop
• A few effective early scares before the plot collapses

Cons

• Bloated 140-minute runtime with punishing pacing
• Incoherent rules for the cupboard's magic
• Underwritten characters whose vices never feel earned
• Overstuffed cast of antagonists dilutes the tension
• Dialogue that gestures at dread without delivering it

Almari is a cautionary tale in more ways than one. Its cupboard punishes those who want too much; the film itself wants too much - too many villains, too many rules, too many minutes - and ends up granting nothing to the audience. A tighter cut, a clearer set of rules, and a sharper focus on one family's moral freefall might have produced the eerie Hindi fantasy-thriller the premise promised. As it stands, this is a dusty cabinet worth leaving shut. Wait for streaming, and even then, temper your wishes.