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. 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.