Nayyi Navelli movie review: Yami Gautam`s film is a nay

Nayyi Navelli movie review: Nay…

17 October,2026 07:15 AM IST |  Mumbai  |  Mayank Shekhar

There’s only one thing to feel, sitting through this daayan-mythology drama: demented!

Yami Gautam in ‘Nayyi Navelli’

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‘Nayyi Navelli’
Dir: Balaji Mohan
Actors: Yami Gautam Dhar, Adinath Kothare
Rating: 1/5

What’s one supposed to make of how a film like this gets greenlit in the first place – what was actually in the script? The genre.

I’m guessing, mumbo-jumbo is supposed to be the mood of the nation, what else? Take TVF’s theatrical debut, The Vvaan, for example, which was rather hard to make sense of.

This is a supernatural comedy. That said, if you can predict from where this movie starts, to where it heads, and eventually how it ends – I’d say no to drugs. This is a piece of sobriety about a woman (Yami Gautam Dhar), who weds a rando in Meerut.

The city and its massive circus for a joint family, as with every cliché of a desi small town, phoopha-ji, bua-ji, chacha-ji, etc – that I only see nostalgically cast from agencies in the movies, and never as much in the same places I visit rather often – seem quite cool with this weird bride who, by reliable accounts, is a witch, for lack of a better word for translating the word ‘daayan’.

But she’s a ‘daayan’ teaching the “unseen ghar ki ladies” the true meaning of feminism – a fact so literally drilled in through dialogues that it appears condescending to the small town and its cohort itself. But that also gives us the only funny part of this film.

Which is that she gets an old aunty-ji in the fam married off to a young IAS officer, because once he applies kajal/kohl on his eyes, he starts to see Mita Vashisht as Jacqueline Fernandez (literally). I’ll leave it to you, if that’s even funny. But this is straight out of the Farrelly Brothers’ flick Shallow Hal (2001).

I can’t see where the film’s going with any of it, until I eventually lose my mind, as the movie, wholly unannounced, totally switches gears, full mental, into mythology, namely Ramayan, bringing in Lord Ram, Ravan, transported into the current yug, and a possible devil-incarnate in this household.

I’m sorry, what happened here? I think the filmmakers simply discovered artificial intelligence to produce cheap special effect that mimic the 1990s Chandrakanta from Doordarshan, instead. No, seriously, I have both my co-viewers on either seat staring at each other mentally murmuring, “What?”

As in, what to make of this dharmic, daayan drama? The damn thing doesn’t stop.

I just spent all my time in the theatre wondering what the filmmakers were thinking. In their head, were they mixing magic realism, along with mythology, and zombies, with the middleclass in Meerut?

Don’t bother. I can merely admire the sheer audacity – for whoever put in the money. And the person who put herself through this, that is Yami.

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