The way I heaved a long, loud sigh after Stree 2, you’d think you heard a ‘pishaachini’.

Amar Kaushik’s Stree 2: Sarkate Ka Aatank, written by Niren Bhatt, is rip-roaringly funny, with characters you cannot help but love: almost every joke, punchline, and gag lands, especially when Pankaj Tripathi as Rudra delivers them. I like how it connects the Maddock Supernatural Universe of Stree, Bhediya, and Munjya. Rajkummar Rao and Abhishek Banerjee’s naïve, small-town buffoon boys act has my heart.

And yet. And this is a big ‘AND YET’ that I cannot ignore. Stree 2 disappointed me, a woman.

Stree 2 builds on the premise and characters of the first film, where a female vengeance spirit known as Stree attacks only men in the village of Chanderi, until a kind young lady tailor Vicky (Rajkummar Rao), with love in his eyes, gives her a haircut. The spirit’s power resides in her hair, and when Vicky chops off her braid, she disappears. But the metaphor lingers — Stree was avenging the wrong that was done to her by a man. And while she was out on the streets, the men hid under the sheets, while the women were free to live as they pleased.

Notice here how the women of Chanderi used this freedom. They wore what they wanted, got educated, worked jobs they aspired to, excelled in sports and other male-dominated fields, dated men they liked, and moved on to bigger cities to pursue their dreams. Imagine what men would do if they had that freedom. Oh, wait. We know.

In Stree 2, a male spirit named Sarkata (headless), with an Andrew Tate brand of misogynistic values, is attacking ‘modern’ Stree and dragging them off to some hidden lair that resembles the inside of Mount Doom. Despite a warning of his arrival, our heroes cannot stop him. Fortunately, Stree (Shraddha Kapoor) is back. And as in real life, the seriousness of the crime doesn’t sink in until one of their own is hurt — Chitti (Anya Singh), the girlfriend of Vicky’s friend Bittu (Aparshakti Khurana), gets abducted.

Finally, the seasoned team of Vicky, Bittu, Rudra (Pankaj Tripathi), and Jana (Abhishek Banerjee), who is fetched from Delhi in a scene that will be familiar to many, along with Stree and her magic choti, go up against this formidable enemy to save the women, as Chanderi cowers in fear and is pushed back into the dark ages where women had to be shut in and ‘behave’.

Stree 2 gives us some perfect jump scares with its new spirit. The jokes are gold, until this very cringe gag when a cameo arrives in the second half, and you can hear some of the people (and me) in my theatre audibly groan. The film’s second half cares only for spectacle, which, okay yay was cool, and the CGI was not bad even when it hat-tipped to every popular fantasy franchise — Harry Potter, Twilight, LOTR. But what was it all for ultimately? What was the message? What were you trying to say?

Stree 2 does fantastic in the first half, establishing its premise at a languorous pace but still entertaining. However, in its second half, it shits the bed. It turns into a screeching loud horror show (I was told there was some issue in the audio I was in; I’d love to know what others think). And maybe you have to have the right chromosomes to enjoy the comedy; around me, people continued to laugh while I was just like, “Erm, what is happening?”

As a woman, watching a screaming woman being dragged away on screen by an evil male spirit, or the ‘saviors’ dilly-dallying and claiming ownership over the women they love (“Humaari nahi meri”) while there were legit women in danger, the wake of what has just happened in Kolkata was triggering. Then again, when are crimes against women not happening in our country? So is there even a good state of mind to watch this film? The anger wasn’t over what was being done to these women. I’m not a snowflake. There was no mindless violence porn either, and I can’t believe I am saying this but at this point, I am thankful to filmmakers for even small mercies such as these — implying the horror instead of outright showing it.

No, What ticked me off in Stree 2 was that it never brought a satisfactory resolution to the problem it proposed. It seemed to imply many half-assed metaphors, then abruptly abandoned them, as if women no longer mattered to the story. What is the film trying to say? Is it a stab at incel culture, where if you head off one troll, two more will pop up in its place like a Hydra monster? Is it taunting men for standing by while women are being violated thus? Is it empowering women, but telling us that without men to help us, we can’t defeat this evil? Is Vicky the Chosen One because he is the perfect balance of masculine and feminine values? What does “love in your eyes and heart” even mean?

All of these make for interesting ideas worth exploring, but the film sort of forgets about them in the middle. Or maybe it’s afraid to commit to them like an actress who avoids making a blatantly feminist statement because she’ll antagonize the male fan base and her mass popularity will take a hit. What other reason does a film called Stree 2 have to do such a botched job of its underlying spirit?

Shraddha Kapoor is barely there in this film that’s named after her character. Her character’s behavior and powers are so harebrained and erratic that they don’t make sense. It’s a spirit-on-spirit war in the climax (that stretches on forever, BTW), and suddenly they have all these powers that make you wonder, “Okay if this was possible, why didn’t you do this before?” Let’s not even get into the supernatural logic of it all, because trust me, as an obsessive genre nerd, I tried to reason it out and my head began spinning.

There’s a scene where the evil villain is being defeated as women break open the restrictions on them to march forth, and men brainwashed into being incels get their eyes opened, literally. It’s all so frustratingly cringe and patronizing as if the writers are trying to mollify women with these peace offerings so they can proceed with their loophole-riddled logic, lip service to women empowerment, and show an end credits song where the woman gets objectified. Nice.

I remember telling my friends before walking in that I was looking forward to a good time. The film’s first half even had me sold. Cut to the seething anger I felt as I walked out of the theatre… I was so mad at what they had reduced the film to in the second half! Because yet again, the male gaze had won.

The film may be named Stree, but it is no longer trying to do much for women. It had done its lip service to the cause of women's empowerment and being a feminist ally. And now it was on to more lucrative things, like building its horror-comedy franchise and catering to general, largely male, sensibilities.

Kyunki's “too much feminism” is scary for men. And they’re privileged enough to live in a world where they can see a film like this and walk home in the middle of the night without glancing twice into the shadows. They can take home the comedy from the film.

But for women, the horrors persist. The true horror of those half-baked metaphors that Stree 2 starts to broach but doesn’t have the intent to address fully, those stay with you much longer than the laughs. About what it feels like to be a woman in a man’s world. Even if you win a small battle, you lose the bigger war because patriarchy is like a Hydra monster that multiplies and retaliates with greater vengeance. Or that men don’t quite consider women’s tastes, sensibilities, and the female gaze important when making a film about women.

By some stroke of a cruel cosmic joke, Stree 2 arrives at a time when we are grappling with a real-life horror of women being devoured by monstrous men while people simply look on, feeling helpless (an actual scene in the film). What’s more, only one man is the ‘rakshak’ to save all these women, but in the end, even he passes the baton to the woman again. And somewhere between all of this passing the parcel of accountability, you know you’ve lost the plot.

Can we get a film that is comedic gold for everyone but sticks to its guns and does right by women? Not today.

Oh Stree, kal aana.

P.S.: Stay for as long as you can after the film ends, because there are two songs and a mid-credits scene squeezed in between. And even then I am not sure it ends.