Stree 2 Review (SPOILERS): Our Three Idiots Are Back! And As Sweet and Normal as Ever!
I already put up my no-spoilers review. You can read that if you want to watch the movie with no spoilers, be surprised by how it plays out. But if you can’t wait for streaming and want to find out what happens, read on! You will still enjoy it for all the silly jokes and clever images, even if you know the plot.
Whole plot in 2 paragraphs:
I missed the first ten minutes, but from what I can put together, Aparshakti Khurrana now has a sort-of girlfriend, a lot of the young woman in the village are leaving home mysteriously, Rajkummar keeps having vivid dreams of Shraddha Kapoor, and Pankaj Tripathi got a mysterious letter warning that now “Stree” is gone, an even worse ghost may start terrorizing the town. I arrived in the theater just as Aparshakti’s girlfriend is kidnapped by a terrifying headless monster ghost. They go back to the letter and learn that this is the ghost of the village elder who killed Stree (because she was a prostitute who dared to want to get married), and who she returned as a ghost and beheaded. So long as Stree was powerful and wandering the village, he was in hiding. But now he is back and kidnapping any woman he thinks is too modern. They warn the villagers and the women quickly start dressing modestly, staying home, etc. But they hate it and demand that Rajkummar fix this so they can have their lives back. Rajkummar and Aparshakti go to Delhi to find Abhishek Banarjee, their friend who was kidnapped by Stree in the first movie, so he can help them bring Stree back. They trick him into returning to the village and convince him to go to the haunted place. He is grabbed and seemingly dies, then comes back to life. Shraddha appears, visible to everyone, and saves them with her magic braid (stolen from Stree in the first movie). She explains she has been studying black magic but even with her new knowledge and her braid powers, she isn’t strong enough to take down this new demon. Abhishek reveals his visions from his near death experience, all the kidnapped women have had their heads shaved and are dressed in white saris, chained up in a mysterious cave, seemingly catatonic.
They come up with a plan to trick the ghost out of hiding, then Rajkummar will use the power of his “eyes with true love” to distract the ghost and stab him with a magic knife. To get the ghost to come out, Pankaj goes to his old friend/lover Tamannah Bhatia, an elegant courtesan. She agrees to dance for the village fair if they promise she will be safe. The demon arrives and at first all the men of the village stand blocking Tamannah. But then the demon takes control of the men and then move away. Rajkummar is unable to defeat the demon and Tamannah is kidnapped. Worse, the men of the village are now brainwashed, they lock their wives at home, close the female schools, and stomp around enforcing their beliefs. The only hope is to go into the demon’s home and fight him there. But only something who is neither man nor woman, beast nor human, can get in. Shraddha merges with Rajkummar’s body to get inside, then tells him to go save the women while she distracts the demon. Once the demon arrives and starts killing Shraddha, Rajkummar is suddenly brave and rushes to fight him. It isn’t enough, and then Varun Dhawan appears as a WEREWOLF! It’s a crossover from Bhediya!!! Abhishek Banarjee’s character was also in Bhediya, and Varun has come to the village to help him as a werewolf. But it isn’t enough, and the demon almost starts killing Shraddha again, until she calls out “MAAA” and Stree appears. Rajkummar is able to pull out the sword that Stree used to kill the demon the first time and give it to her, she kills the demon again, and then goes away, finally released. The women break out of their spell and are able to go home. Shraddha, once again, says goodbye to Rajkummar at the bus stop but this time tells him her truth (which she thinks will make him never want to see her again). She is Stree’s daughter, who has become a spirit herself. She has been wandering the earth all this time trying to release her mother’s soul. Rajkummar doesn’t care. She touches him and says goodbye and a golden light flows into him. The END (epilogue: Varun asks Abhishek for an introduction to Shraddha, and then there is a funny song with Varun and Rajkummar both trying to woo her over the end credits)
Most important thing, Shraddha’s backstory finally makes sense! In the first movie, there was this whole “is she the ghost? Is she not?” and then it seemed to resolve as “you fools, you were afraid just because she is a strong woman, she’s not the ghost she is a ghost HUNTER!” But the twist at the end, when she magically uses the braid to disappear of the bus suddenly made this all confusing again.
This movie sets it all back again! The biggest way is by making Rajkummar soooooooooooooooooo accepting of everything. It’s a conscious correction to the audience. “Look, the hero doesn’t care who or what she is, he just knows she is doing good things and helping people and loves her. Why can’t we be the same?” And then the reveal that yes, she actually is a ghost/spirit/magical being. But who cares? She’s just trying to help her Mom find peace, she’s not harming anyone, and everything bad that has happened to her (and her mother) is the fault of others. Rajkummar is told over and over again that his special power is his loving heart. And it’s true. His ability to love and respect all people is what sets him apart, despite his goofiness and dumb choices and cowardice and just humanity.
Halfway through the movie, the village women confront Rajkummar and blame him for getting rid of Stree. They point out that while she was around, they (the women) had more power and freedom then ever before because all the men were scared. And now this new monster has come to power and they have less freedom than ever. That’s the point of the two films, you can’t investigate gender issues in just one movie, you have to have one for the women and one for the men.
In Stree 1, Rajkummar saw the men as human, as victims, not as butts of jokes for being defeated by a “mere woman” or as strong people who should save themselves. That was a big statement, taking a horror film and giving the powerlessness usually experienced by female victims to male victims. And still rescuing them, still landing on the side of “this is terrible, these people need to be saved”. And in Stree 2, he sees the women as victims. Not just the women who were taken, but the women whose lives are being destroyed by fear as they are trapped at home. He “saves” them by giving them their lives back. He is a village boy, he is shy to touch women, he teases his friends about having girlfriends, this isn’t some impossible perfect ideal man. But underneath it all, he still knows men and women are both human. That’s not a hard bar to pass, for anyone watching this film, and the film challenges you to cross it.
There’s a lot of other stuff that this film does well. The moments when the monster has taken control of the men of the village and they storm around locking up women are a little bit TOO real. That’s the scariest time of the film, far scarier than any ghost monster. Bringing in Varun as a dopey guest star Werewolf is just FUN, and an unforced way of building a cool combined universe. The ghost backstory continues to be topnotch. It was already good when we learned Stree was a sex worker killed by the men of the village who didn’t think she deserved to be married. Now there is the added story that she was a mother and her daughter witnessed her death, AND that the men who killed her are more diseased and evil spirits than she ever was. Her humanity continues, and the inhumanity of men who punish her for being outside of society continues as well.
My one tiny tiny complaint is an Akshay Kumar cameo. He plays a madman and descendent of the evil village chief family who is the one that sent the warning letter. In his first intro, he just seems like a crazy person happily living in an asylum who sincerely warned them. But in the end credits tag, he seemingly takes on the spirit of his dead ancestor as though maybe that was his plan all along? I don’t love adding Akshay to this very fragile mixture of elements, and I don’t love the tease of a third film. This film really does feel like a natural continuation of of the first film, completing the story in a way that was always planned. But a third film? That feels forced.
