RATING: * * 1/2

Well Gurinder Chadha’s, It’s a Wonderful Afterlife, is wonderful but in bits and pieces. The film is very different from the products that have been churned out of Chadha’s factory earlier, even though it uses the same setting. As she calls it, this supernatural-horror-comedy-romance, Afterlife..dabbles with the whole fear psychosis that looms large in the minds of Indian mothers, esp those who have ordinary looking daughters, that their girls may never find a match. While Bride and Prejudice gave it to her on a platter as she served us a mother’s desperation straight out of the book, in Afterlife…she does it herself. Seems like the mendicants of her last film never left her creative periphery. But what she does add to her new film are the Indian phenomena of re-incarnation, spirits and life after death. Karma too ends up occupying a pivotal slot in Chadha’s film.

Now Afterlife.. swings from slapstick to hyperbole and grotesque. The opening scene leaves us almost nauseated. Just as we are recovering from a sense of never wanting to touch curry again, we are again left feeling sick in the stomach with some very hideous looking ghosts. But we soon adjust our eyes to getting used to them and seeing them through Chadha’s humourous lens.

One does laugh in a few scenes but what touches us is the effortlessness with which Chadha engages us in something that is such a no-brainer. She uses a lot of genres, gives them a heady mix and produces a film that is at best an easy watch, while it tries to tell us to be and do good in life and also re-iterates that pretty isn’t always in.

You will love the film, if you can appreciate the bindaas style of this bindaas director who follows the mantra of ‘Zor ka jhatka dheere se lage’,  as she subtly exposes the follies and hypocrisy of the Indian psyche and lets us have our share of fun too.

Shabana Azmi, Goldy Notay and Sendhil Ramamurthy, all give great performances. All the ghosts too dole out some super peroformances.