Bhushan Patel's Alone, the latest addition to Bipasha Basu's growing body of 'horror' work, presses every available button to rake up the dark past in ways that are both gruesome and intriguing, but it cannot shrug off the sheer banality of the genre.
Bipasha, the high priestess of Bollywood horror, does her bit by plunging into her double role with customary enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Alone is neither original in terms of substance nor does it come up with any strikingly new methods to evoke fear.
It rips off the storyline of the 2007 Thai horror film, Fad (meaning Twins), in which two conjoined twins are separated from each other amid destructive envy, distrust and violence when a handsome man falls in love with one of them and arouses the jealousy of the other.
Bhushan Patel already has two successful genre films – Ragini MMS and 1920: Evil Returns – under his belt. His experience of the horror domain is both good and bad for Alone.
On one hand he knows exactly how to employ light, shadow, camera angles and sound effects to create an ambience of dread and foreboding. He puts some of that expertise to good use here, at least in parts.
On the other, the approaches that Patel uses border on the hackneyed and repetitive as a result of the fact that he is working primarily with tropes stored in his directorial memory.
At the outset of Alone, a happily married couple, Sanjana (Bipasha Basu) and Kabir (Karan Singh Grover), arrive at the woman's childhood home after her mother meets with an accident. There, an apparition, a mirror image of the heroine, begins to hound Sanjana and the man she loves.
It turns out to be the spirit of her twin, Anjana, who died years ago when the girls were surgically separated.
Alone is a love triangle that moves back and forth between the present and the past, but the intrigue of the tale wears off rather quickly because the shocks that it delivers acquire a predictable rhythm.
Television actor Karan Singh Grover is given enough opportunities to scorch the screen in the company of the sultry Bipasha.
He gleefully flaunts his abs and biceps, ratchets up the heat in the film's bolder moments, but when it matters most in the occasional emotional scene, he is not equal to the task.
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