Nishir Daak is about a group of students from the city who decide to spend their Puja holidays in a village called Sonamukhi, where a classical singer named Nishigandha Bhaduri, a forgotten muse of Tagore, used to live long ago. Intrigued by the connection, they try to trace her history but instead get entangled in a web of death, terror and vengeance. They discover to their horror that the village withholds a dark secret and is cursed by an evil, vengeful spirit that awakens when the sound of singing is heard. As the folklore connected to past mysterious deaths in the mansion where they stay gives way to its present horrors, including a murder in their own midst, the students are left to fend for themselves in a haunted house in a remote village with no one to come to their rescue.
Little more than a minute long, the teaser strikes terror from the outset. The haunting strains of the Tagore number Baaje karun sure in a lady's voice, accompanied by the soft tinkle of anklets of an unseen woman evoke a nameless dread. The song's unmistakable association with another horror story, Monihara, immortalised in Satyajit Ray's film based on Tagore's story, is perhaps deliberately and instantly established. Arousing a similar expectation of sinister happenings in Nishir Daak, it suggests a tale of betrayal with a dead spirit returning to seek revenge. A haunted mansion overgrown with dead roots and branches, the silhouette of a red sari-clad woman with blood-stained, claw-like nails laughing hysterically, the sight of a dead man hanging from a tree, and many such images evoke an eerie atmosphere effectively. Some slick editing tricks, with the appropriate sound and lighting effects, enhance the desired ambience and mood of this story of death, doom and destruction.
Surangana Bandyopadhyay, who apparently plays the role of Nishigandha and is probably visualised in flashback, wears a faraway, melancholy look that invests her character with an extraordinary mystery and aura. Dressed in Benarasi saris and heavy gold jewellery, she recreates the regal, antiquated charm associated with that era. In another shot, Surangana is seen dressed simply like a married Bengali woman, singing while she is playing the tanpura, perhaps in a contemporary reincarnation of the earlier character. Sreeja Dutta, Rik Chatterjee, Sweta Mishra, Arunava Dey, Raunak Dey Bhowmick, Somak Ghosh and Satyam Bhattacharya play the other important characters in this horror series.
Full of ominous portents, a disquieting stillness, a sense of lurking danger and imminent disaster, Nishir Daak, Joydeep Mukherjee's first venture into the realm of supernatural storytelling, will premiere on Hoichoi on October 17, just ahead of Bhoot Chaturdashi, the day when Bengalis commemorate the day of the dead.