Erotic thrillers, no matter how good they are, have always received partial response from the audience for the erotica involved in it. However, with industry opening up to various kinds of films, even Erotica centered around a story is finding its way to the ticket windows. Gambling in the territory is filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri who last made John Abraham starter Goal who comes up with the bold film Hate Story. Whether this film has story strong enough to drive people to the theaters or not remains to be seen.

Right from the first look of the film, you know that Hate Story is a revenge saga. Kaavya Krishna (Paoli Dam) is a journalist who exposes a big cement firm through sting operation. The expose doesn’t go down well with Siddharth Dhanrajgir (Gulshan Devaiya) the head honcho of the firm and he chooses to use and throw Kaavya. He appoints her, gives her all the luxuries, sleeps around with her and even leaves her. The moment she turns pregnant, he forcefully gets her child aborted and ensures that she never becomes pregnant again. Feeling humiliated, scarred for life and betrayed ruthlessly, Kaavya swears revenge and then begins her vendetta saga where she openly uses her body to lust men and get her work done. How she eventually succeeds in taking revenge is what follows through the rest of the plot.

A revenge saga, if dealt properly, can at least make for an interesting one time watch. However, Vivek Agnihotri falters at the basic premise of it. The entire ‘normal girl turning into a prostitute to seek revenge’ doesn’t quite gel well with the storyline as in the process she is seen sleeping around with only two men to work her way up the ladder. A task for which she needn’t necessarily had to hire a prostitute to learn the tricks of fake.

Moreover, Vivek takes too many cinematic liberties to make the story proceed. The length of the film is another hassle. At a full length feature film of 2 and a half hour, you irksomely start hating the time being put to finish viewing it.

Bengali actress Paoli Dam dares to bare it all in her first film itself and confidently pulls off some scenes that could give shudders to many others. Even on the acting front she decently essays her part. Gulshan Devaiya comes as a let-down as he has shown better potential in his prior two films Shaitan and That Girl In Yellow Boots. Nikhil Dwivedi gets completely wasted, a track shoved down the drains.

Over all, you might have more reasons to hate this story than enjoy it.