Merry Christmas Review

There is something about festivals that amplifies the loneliness of your heart. In Sriram Raghavan’s dazzling new movie Merry Christmas, this core idea of loneliness becomes an impregnable presence as we track two characters and their loneliness over a period of a little over twelve hours.

In typical Raghavan fashion, the movie is a delicious delight for a cinephile, tattered with easter eggs, references to old Indian and Western classics, and a background score that makes it all appear like a Broadway play. We start with Albert (Vijay Sethupathi), who claims to have returned to Mumbai after seven years. He tells Maria (Katrina Kaif) that he was in Dubai all these years, having met her and her daughter first in a restaurant and then at Regal, watching Pinnochio. Maria is a single mother, who almost immediately forms a bond with Albert, the kind of connection you wait and wish for all your life, but stumble upon only once or twice in a lifetime.

The recipe for a romance is set, and Raghavan designs the first act of his movie as a beautiful, dream-like romance. The chance encounter of two lonely people in a city of millions, a few drinks, a tantalizing set-piece where the two spring into an impromptu dance, an elevator kiss, and you’re sucked in the world of Albert and Maria.

Unlike earlier Raghavan directorial, where the greyness of the characters was introduced to us as a matter-of-fact reality, in Merry Christmas the movie tasks us to see these two as simple beings in a crowded yet lonely world, relish in their innocent, young romance. You want them to be happy, to have a happy ending. But this is a Sriram Raghavan movie, the Christmas cannot be as merry as the title of the movie suggests.

A dead body, another suitor, and a police officer for an eye for detail crowd the scene as the plot thickens. But Raghavan remains true to what his intentions are here. Unlike the brilliantly conceived Andhadhun, Merry Christmas is less about the crime and more about the criminal – no, that makes it sound like Badlapur – it is less about the criminal and more about the arc of redemption of the human being behind that criminal.

This is basically what you would get if Raghavan directed Hulu’s popular show Only Murders in the Building. Like that show where a murder becomes the basis for the writers to explore the loneliness of its three primary characters, Raghavan and his writers use the presence of a dead body here to do more than tell a suspenseful whodunit.

Instead, the movie is a character study, more than anything else. It is a narrative based on choice, and its eventual implications. Just how in Before Sunrise Celine (Julie Delpy) decides to disembark and spend time with Jesse (Ethan Hawke), Albert’s choice to spend a few hours with Maria has a ripple effect that is far beyond what he could have imagined.

The movie tries to find truth in their deceptions (at one point Albert retracts his Dubai story to say he came from Nasik), but also refuses to give us the comfort of a parallel, more trustworthy narrative. We have to trust these bunch of untrustworthy characters, and navigate our way. It makes for a delicious mystery, one where the audience is left in a free-flow, to decide who they trust, and who they root for.

It helps that the performances remain consistently top-notch. I have never seen such long, undisturbed moments of Kaif’s close-up as she delivers a dialogue, and ace it to the tee. This is a masterful performance by Kaif, one that serves as a timely reminder that there is more to her than what a Spy Universe asks her to be. Vijay Sethupathi is reliably solid, his eyes constantly reeking of an ache the source of which you are never too sure of.

There is also a constant artistic brilliance at show here, nothing more spectacular as the final few minutes where everything is conveyed without the use of a single dialogue (another moment where I was reminded of Only Murders in the Building).

Merry Christmas might not be the twisty narrative that Andhadhun offered, but it is always nice to see a director experimenting after a success than becoming a prisoner of a tried formula. This is Sriram Raghavan in total control of his power as a storyteller, teasing us into baits of romance, and murder, before encapsulating it all into a study of crime, criminals, and loneliness.ur

Trial By Fire Review

At the risk of making a major statement early in the year, Trial By Fire might just be the revolution we need to tell real-life tragedies in an emotional, empathetic and holistic way. The reason for that is a series of masterful, bold creative decisions taken in the seven-episode-long affair of incredible storytelling.

At the core, like any well-serving narrative around a tragedy, are the grieving underdogs. Here that is Shekhar (Abhay Deol) and Neelam Krishnamoorthy (Rajshri Deshpande), a young couple we first meet in 1997, a few hours before the infamous Uphaar Cinema Fire. This incident is a well-documented one. During a show of J. P. Dutta’s directorial Border, a short circuit led to a deadly fire at South Delhi’s Uphaar Cinema owned by the Ansal brothers, killing fifty-nine people.

Krishnamoorthy couple, whose book by the same name becomes the basis for the show directed by Prashant Nair and Randeep Jha, become our entry and exit point into this tragedy and its aftermath. They lost both their children in this accident, triggering a twenty-year-long legal battle, attempting to punish the Ansal brothers for what happened at a cinema hall they owned and profited from.

This makes it sound like another underdogs-trying-to-fight-injustice narrative. It is a familiar path that works if done well. But the creative minds behind Trial By Fire are attempting to go beyond the normal expectations of this structure. Instead, they realize that the real protagonist of the story cannot be the parents of the two victims, but the incident itself.

It is a rich and respectful way of memorializing an incident that continues to stand as a tall reminder of hypocrisy in the face of Ansal Plaza’s thriving story, Delhi’s first mall that the Ansal brothers made months after the Uphaar incident. So, as we move past a moving opening episode where a tearing Deol makes a case for a show that will focus on the couple’s long and lonely fight for justice, the story is shaken up for the first time.

We meet an impoverished, elderly man who has lost seven of his family in the fire, the youngest being his six-month-old granddaughter. As we see his struggle to give them a fitting funeral, one realizes that fighting for justice and establishing AVUT (Association of Victims of Uphaar Tragedy) is a privilege that is rare too.

This is when the show expands beyond the fight by Krishnamoorthy’s while remaining loyal and present to their narrative. The show uses non-linear storytelling to keep the tragedy as the central focus even as the court case distances the Krishnamoorthy couple from the year of the incident.

We see an elderly couple with a military background battling their inner demons as they walk out for the fateful show of Border, there’s an insignificant employee who is made the scapegoat to save the bigger fishes in the pond, all stories finding their connecting roots in that fire where the final episodes culminate in a visual depiction of dread that reminded me of that overlong but incredibly moving Jallianwala Bagh section from Sardar Udham.

Beyond this, the show also does something interesting with the idea of avenging an accident. Taking forward the legacy of critiquing the idea of revenge from An Action Hero, Trial By Fire depicts families of the lost shifting their focus in a pivotal moment during the latter half of the season. Their fight, like the show itself, becomes more than just avenging the deaths of their loved ones. The fight takes a deeper responsibility of ensuring that the system that failed those at Uphaar cinema in 1997 is mended. AVUD, then, becomes the face of a social cause beyond its original attempt of bringing justice, and in the arc of Trial By Fire finds a space to excel in that most stories centered around real-life tragedies fail to access.

Trial By Fire is a structural marvel with top central performances by Deol and Deshpande. There is enough here to make you teary, not in a way that is manipulative but in simpler ways than a tragedy like this demands. But what makes it an exceptional show is its ability to hold rationality over sentimentality, seeing loss as a collapse of an institution than of personal void. In doing that it surprises the audience into a gripping exploration of the Uphaar Fire instead of a meek, indulgent narrative of tear-jerking melodrama, that may still have worked but would have rendered a lesser tribute to the fight and might of the Krishnamoorthy couple.

Now Streaming on Netflix

Monica O My Darling Review

At one point in Vasan Bala’s directorial Monica O My Darling multiple characters find themselves in a fancy washroom, each with a mystery of their own in a world both twisted and tragic. It took me to the final bit of that fantastic sequence from Andhadhun where Akaash (Ayushmann Khurrana) finds himself in the washroom with Inspector Manohar (Manav Vij) at Pramod’s place.

Set in Pune, Monica O My Darling reminded me of Andhadhun multiple times. It felt like Bala’s film belongs to the same universe where Andhadhun existed. A world where people not just entertain but embrace the grey in order to rise up the ladder of success. Jayant Arkhedkar (Rajkumar Rao) is a man of technology, rising up the ranks at Unicorn, a robotics firm quite soothingly by becoming the “professional son” of the head of the company. He is engaged to his boss’s daughter and has a seemingly perfect life. Everything is perfect. Except he is also sleeping with Monica (Huma Qureshi), his boss’s personal assistant.

Writer Yogesh Chandrekar adapts this premise from Burutasu No Shinzou, a Japanese novel, but gives it a glorious, intoxicating Indian backdrop. He uses its pulpy premise of love, lust, ambition and corrupted souls to create a film that nods not once but multiple times to the fascinating tradition of 70s and 80s Hindi cinema. Bala expands on this by bringing his trademark style that made his previous film Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota a fantastic watch.

What makes this one a winner is how easily Bala’s love for a certain kind of Hindi cinema lends itself to this story. It does not feel forced. In fact, there seems no other way was better to tell this story. It helps that in Rajkumar Rao, Huma Qureshi, Radhika Apte, and Sikander Kher are in top form here, keeping the story both engaging and eerily funny.

The film has whacky but vulnerable characters, each anchored by their insecurities, and made relatable by their inconsistencies. As a terrific Apte says as the investigating officer, the backstory of a backstory should not be air-tight. The film, too, uses this theory deliciously. It remains enjoyable, never caring to fill its fun by logic.

In one of the best montage sequence I have seen in a Hindi film for a while, a panting Jayant yells at a stranger for the choice of song playing on the FM channel. It is a blink-and-miss moment that brings great poignancy to the world-building of Bala. It is how we respond to songs when our life finds a way to build a strange relationship with it. Here the name ‘Monica’ becomes both the companion and chaos to Jayant’s arc.

Another terrific element here is of snakes and ladder. The film repeatedly forces us to wonder who is the snake and what is the price of that enigmatic ladder that takes us to the top of the game. In that sense Monica O My Darling is also a Parasite-esque commentary on class, done in a way that makes it eccentrically Indian.

This is not to say the film is bereft of flaws, but in a film so tantalizingly absorbed in embracing its form, flaws blend into creative decisions masked under the idea of the absurd. This is no Andhadhun in a way that it does not have a glowing moment of impeccable filmmaking, but a constant joyride with twists working as commentary as well as a comforting, nostalgic nod to the yesteryear of Hindi films. Monica O My Darling is nostalgia and storytelling done right. At no point does it feel indulgent or unnecessary. It flows in its own world like a reminder that stories remain the same across eras, and sometimes all we should do is lend into the absurdity of a Monica far from the one Hellen played on screen and give in to the need to fill a story with an R. D. Burman classic, infused with the terrific score by Anchit Thakkar.

Now streaming on Netflix

Only Murders in the Building – Disability and Dialogue

I recently watched Only Murders in the Building. I had heard a lot about the show and a few Emmy nominations eventually pushed me to give it a shot. I am not the first person to be mesmerized by the quality of this comedy-cum-murder-mystery involving three fans of true crime podcasts. There is a lot to admire about the show (which is in its second season currently) but the one thing that got my attention was the representation of disability and an important pursuit of showing the disabled community and people with disability as dysfunctional, messy, and often silly individuals.

Only Murders in the Building follows Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) two out-of-work old men, and a twenty-eight-year-old Mabel (Selena Gomez) as they attempt to solve a murder in the building they live in while starting a podcast about the crime that shares the name of the show.

I expected the show to be a fun experience, which it was. What I did not expect was to see some intelligent representation of disability. The sixth episode of the first season, titled ‘The Boy From 6B’ is an incredible feat in televised storytelling. Chronicling and placing Theo (James Caverly) in the narrative, the episode focuses on this character with hearing and speech impairment who plays an important role in what forms the crux of Mabel’s past and why she is emotionally invested in this recent murder.

The episode adopts an incredible no-dialogue approach to storytelling, giving us a sense of how the world must feel to Theo. As we see characters interacting, and the story progressing without any dialogue for almost the entirety of the episode, Theo’s words to his father – “Everyone talks way too fucking much in this city” – sit right there.

These words become a fascinating critique not just of human society or New York, but also of storytelling. As we see the world from the perspective of Theo, where conversations are as muted as the sound of someone falling off a terrace, we see the power that lies in the visual medium of storytelling even in absence of dialogues. In a single moment of an incredible leap of faith, Only Murders in the Building achieves a feat that champions not just a well-rounded representation of disability (James Caverly is himself an actor from the deaf community) but also thrilling storytelling.

Later in the season an episode titled ‘Fan Fiction’, we see a group of fans of the aforementioned podcast run by the three protagonists of the show. One of the fans is Paulette, (Ali Stroker) a wheelchair user. The first time we see her it is almost easy to miss her wheelchair. It is that innately a part of who she is. Almost impossible to distinguish as something separate from her body.

The next time she appears, we see the wheelchair better. There she is – a fangirl amidst the artists she respects. Just another young millennial who is driven by the world of true crime podcasts. Stroker, like Caverly, is an actor with disability. Maybe that is why her intimacy with her wheelchair feels so natural, and the nonchalance of her being just a girl in a wheelchair so powerful.

She is not a strong part of the plot like Theo, but that makes it equally compelling to have her there. A nonchalance presence. A reminder that a character in a wheelchair does not need to be important, their disability does not have to be a plot point. Paulette is just another side character in the show, just as Theo is another resident of the building.

Only Murders in the Building is a show that has made an important step towards establishing disability as a nonchalant part of our society as well as a way of honing a story’s artistic reach. ‘The Boy From 6B’ is what happens when you let a character’s medical condition be a part of your narrative perspective. And ‘Fan Fiction’ is how you normalize disability. See it as a part of life, just another dimension to our world as it exists, and somewhere between these two incredible episodes, the show did something that needs to be applauded and will hopefully be remembered.

Now Streaming on Disney+Hotstar

Mai Review

Netflix’s new crime-thriller, Mai, is a strange one. It runs dangerously close to being ruptured in its cliched premise but also has the promise of being one of the most wonderful shows to come out of Netflix India, if not the entire Indian webspace. And as it reaches the final few moments of its six-episode first season, it disappoints on both accounts.

The easiest way to describe the show would be to call it an unremarkable, above-average crime show. There are moments of deep poignance that work in ways that you are immediately hooked to the narrative before a creative call to the side towards a political conspiracy ruins its chance of becoming a truly special show.

The show stars Sakshi Tanwar as the titular ‘Mai’, a woman who is firmly determined to find the truth behind her mute daughter (Wamiqa Gabbi) after she is killed by a rampaging truck. Sheel (Tanwar) is an underdog through and through. Tanwar, in an absolutely brilliant central performance, gives Sheel a sense of simplistic vulnerability that seems to come naturally to the character.

And yet, director and show-runner Atul Mongia makes her shift from being a docile homemaker to a vengeful mother quite believable. Unlike Mom, starring the late Sridevi, Mai gathers momentum, not by its star power, but its understanding of the world it belongs to. In that, it becomes a story of a woman thrashing through gender norms and societal expectations from a woman without ever thinking of the larger implication of her actions.

There is a moment when Sheel uses a rod to hit a man repeatedly. It quickly reminds you of the climax of NH10 where Meera (Anushka Sharma) went on a rampage towards the climax of the film. That was the first film produced by Clean Slate Filmz. Mai is their second show after the brilliant Pataal Lok on Prime. There are parallels that are impossible to miss. A production house breaking down generations of gendered roles one story at a time.

This also explains why the show is set in Lucknow, a city that has been accused of abusing women, subverting their rights, and submerging their voice in the name of culture and Tehzeeb for centuries. In the world of Mai, there is no place for tehzeeb. Sheel has to be brutal, rowdy, and a tactical mastermind – everything that a woman is not expected to be. Her husband, Yash (Vivek Mushran), is himself pawned by his elder brother. A case of layered subjugation that Sheel is determined to break for the sake of her deceased daughter.

In its best moments, the show is pensive and introspective. A scene involving the husband and wife discussing their daughter’s love life is written and performed so beautifully that it makes you want to see this turn into an emotional drama. This is more because the crime part of the show – especially away from Sheel – is poorly written and unengaging.

Mai could have been a great show. It still falls well up in the list of mother-revenge dramas that have come out in the last few years, right after the brilliant Ajji. It is a good show with some terrific performances. But is pulled down by moments of uninspired, convenient storytelling that halt the emotional frequency at which it aspires to operate.

Now Streaming on Netflix

Jalsa Review

Roland Barthes, the famous French literary critic, once said that striptease becomes compelling not because a woman takes off her clothes, but because the process involves an elaborate teasing that builds up the anticipation of the viewer. This technique also works in cinema, but very few films are comfortable holding their cards. Suresh Triveni’s second directorial is one of those.

Jalsa is a trembling story of two women on the opposite spectrum of society. Maya (Vidya Balan) is an affluent journalist living a fancy life with her mother and disabled son. Rukshana (Shefali Shah) is her house-help, who takes wonderful care of Maya’s son, being a devoted helper despite a turbulent personal life.

The story of the film unfolds over a period of one week after Rukhsana’s eighteen-year-old daughter is critically injured in a hit-and-run case. This particular sequence (where the film begins) is shot with a very gothic urgency by cinematographer Saurabh Goswami. There is an echo of what is to come in the early visuals of the film. Anticipation of a dooming climax is apparent, and yet when the moment of friction comes, you are taken by surprise.

Soon enough we are introduced to the world of Jalsa. We follow a normal day in the life of Maya, a woman a short-hand message would categorize as “boss-lady”, a gross inappropriation of a dynamic, rounded character like hers. We see Maya as an unflappable presence early in the film, a contrast to the financially insecure, and societally subordinated Rukhsana, who almost feels like she owes a kind smile to Maya and her family for continuing normalcy in her life.

Writers Prajwal Chandrashekhar, Hussain Dalal, and Abbas Dalal, along with director Suresh Triveni use this premise of a hit-and-run case to give us a two-hour journey of compromised bets, guilt, loss, and the obsession with continuing one’s current normalcy, even at the cost of a life.

Triveni does a brilliant job here of directing this story, not as a whodunnit, but as a complex human story. The style of storytelling, and the story at an interest odd here, which Triveni balances wonderfully. The film baits us into thinking that we are in for a taut thriller, but what we get is a compelling story of human frailty in the midst of chaos.

This becomes apparent in a wonderful scene where Maya yells at Rukhsana for neglecting her son for a call. It is a fantastic scene of confrontation that threads the final twenty minutes of the movie wonderfully. It is a perfect visual catharsis in a film that runs with an inaudible sound of “tick…tick” in the viewer’s mind. As a viewer, you know that something is on the verge of happening, but Triveni holds on to his cards long enough to make us a little greedy for this moment and everything that bursts from here.

It helps that in Balan and Shah, the film boasts of two relentlessly powerful performances. It is as if the two stalwarts are in a world of their own, not just living their parts, but carrying the burden, and bruises of what the story does not show us. It would be wrong to rate one performance over the other because both are exceedingly captivating performances, that elevate this already impressive film into a world of its own.

Jalsa, like most good movies, is about choices, and the consequences that come with each choice. Here is a film that is confident of itself. The writing does not shy away from getting dense, the acting remains devoted to the moment, and the background score by Gaurav Chatterji, comfortable being a healthy aid, and not being obsessed with simplifying ideas and expressions with a thumping roar or a decisive melancholic hum. Jalsa is a rare film where intelligent writing meets fantastic acting. It is special, without pretending to be anything but another story.

Streaming on Amazon Prime

A Thursday Review

A week after Badhaai Do proved that the vague notion of a spiritual sequel can work on occasions, comes A Thursday a spiritual sequel of Neeraj Pandey’s 2008 directorial A Wednesday. Unlike the former, this one works as an unintentional antithesis to the Shah-Kher-starrer. A Thursday works best as a reminder of how problematic the premise of A Wednesday was, hiding the right-wing politics of its filmmaker that found its bloom with Akshay Kumar in later films.
Starring Yami Gautam Dhar, the film revolves around a nursery teacher who takes sixteen kids hostage on what appears to be a random Thursday. Writer-director Behzad Khambata diverts from the predecessor in keeping the stakes more personal here than societal (while also making a sweeping comment on the society).
The film begins well. We meet Naina (Dhar), a teacher who appears to be nothing short of an angel. She remembers the birthday of kids, offers them a safe space, makes them laugh, and feel like they have a trustworthy adult in her. As it turns out, there is more to her than her friendly side.
Khambata does well to build the tension. The stakes are high. More visible in its individualism than A Wednesday. But despite a solid, potentially career-best performance by Yami Gautam Dhar, one wonders if her inability to grasp the role by its throat right from the word go, makes one waver off their attention.
Her performance gets better, and with a stalwart like Atul Kulkarni, and a guest appearance by Dimple Kapadia giving the movie some of its best moments, the film remains watchable if not intriguing. The problem though is how Khambata weaves the social commentary in this world of a thrilling hostage situation. Neeraj Pandey had the luxury of a terrific Naseeruddin Shah at his disposal to deliver a powerful monologue.
To be honest, even that monologue felt a little dragged, and dramatic. But it was Shah who still brought an earnestness to that moment that hid the obvious writing flaws that threatened to dismantle the good work done in the first hour of that movie. Here the weight of a screenplay desperate for some socio-cultural gravitas crumbles too dramatically for Dhar to save it from becoming an easily forgettable film.
A Thursday is a film that fits a very specific sub-genre that bloomed in 2018. The sub-genre did not work then, and in 2022 it feels nothing more than a few artists stuck in a time-loop where they feel an idea that worked in a very specific context in 2008 will work fourteen years later too.
Now Streaming on Disney+Hotstar

Aarya Season 2 Review

In its second outing, Aarya, an official adaptation of Dutch drama Penoza, plays out like a batter scoring a Test Match century on a bouncy, seaming Melbourne wicket. It begins shakily like most innings begin when facing the Aussie pace battery. There are swings and misses, nervous jabs at the ball, and edges that either fall short of the fielders, or escape between their arms. This, before the batter, settles at the crease for a long vigil. The timing gets better, the bat swing more confident, and footwork, pronounced. It takes time, but the batter is in form and here to stay.
This is exactly how season 2 of Aarya progresses. After a brilliant first season where the titular Aarya (Sushmita Sen) avenged her husband’s (Chandrachur Singh) murder, exposing the bare remains of a dysfunctional family with a skewed sense of love, and sticking together as a family, season two opens a year after where we left things at the end of the first season. And yet, little seems to have changed.
Ram Madhvani, the creator of this largely fascinating show, seems to have kept these characters in a time capsule where despite a year later, things remain oddly familiar. Aarya and her kids return from Australia to provide the defining verbal proof in the case against her father Zorawar (Jayant Kriplani) and Sangram (Ankur Bhatia).
The conflict – the reason why Aarya overstays in India to tighten the tension – feels forced, and honestly a little frustrating. Her old ally ACP Khan (Vikas Kumar) becomes her enemy as Aarya muddles with the chaos of a broken family, the claustrophobic sense of inevitability of being a prey in an ocean of sharks; being a mother in a patriarchal world dominated (in her case) with bullets, money, and a very real fear of life.
Madhvani, along with his writers Sanyukhta Chawla, Shaikh, and Anu Singh Chaudhary, starts to gain momentum after the first couple of episodes. Till then, the onus is on Sen to keep us interested enough in the narrative before we reach the later stages of the season. Despite the death of her husband looming large even in the second season (Anu’s clinical depression is an interesting arc that reaches nowhere, eventually), the show is more bothered with the prelude to another dangerous, fatal plot point.
Once that point is reached, the season returns to what it showed itself to be in its first outing. A plethora of characters hound around Aarya, as she desperately tries to not become the “sherni” she was forced to embody in the first season. She is a reluctant protagonist of a show that peaks only in the image of its protagonist.
As we reach later episodes things become thicker and more interesting. A terrific interrogation sequence is followed by a sincere if not a very original kidnapping sequence, that lends itself to a fantastic final episode that finds Aarya accepting her new life, instead of running away from it.
The end of this season completes the arc of Aarya, the protagonist. From wanting to run away from the centre stage at the end of the first season two showcases a sense of joy, an acceptance of red on her face, in the closing minutes of the second season forms her entire arc. What helps is a terrific central performance by Sen who seems to be operating on a different space altogether when pitted against other, very able, actors.
What worked for the show in season one was the blend of familial chaos, grief, and existential discomfort, juxtaposed by the larger design of a crime drama. In season two, with Aarya finding reliable support in her elder son Veer (Viren Vazirani), the crime takes over, even as familial grief finds its voice in Aru’s track, which is left half-baked despite a sincere performance by Virti Vaghani.
This leaves a show a little unhinged, but thanks to some stellar writing, direction, and use of old Hindi movies songs (especially in the latter half of the season), and Sen’s unbelievably good performance, the second season manages to hold itself strongly like a seasoned batter who knows the art of getting through rough beginnings to still notch up a laudable performance by the end of the day’s play.
Now Streaming on Disney+Hotstar

Bob Biswas Review

Some of the greatest literary, and cinematic villains have one thing in common – the ambiguity they come with. From Iago of Othello, Joker from The Dark Knight, Gabbar from Sholay, and Mr. A from Dhoom 2. All these characters share a sense of mystery that they came with. Their actions are not justified, their back-story never explored with a pinpoint accuracy that would make it believable. In Kahaani writer Advaita Kala and director Sujoy Ghosh gave us a terrifying character in Bob Biswas (Saswata Chatterjee) who had everything to become an iconic antagonist. A below-average, forgettable man who was a cold killer. Ghosh built such mystery around him that you were both alarmed and intrigued by the very sight of Chatterjee in the film. In Bob Biswas, Sujoy Ghosh gives us a peek into the world of Biswas, except the entire process becomes a sad case of breaking the myth of the original character brick-by-brick before he becomes someone you are expected to feel bad about.

We first meet Bob (Abhishek Bachchan) when he is suffering from amnesia. He has little clue about his past life after being in coma for eight long years. Now, his wife Mary (Chitrangada Sen) and a child are completely wiped from his memory. He returns to his life – his old job – oblivious to the other side of his personality. It is a scintillating premise that comes with immense possibility, but also strange purposelessness.

This is not an origin story, in its barest of definitions. As I saw the trailer I was mildly intrigued to see how a common man went from being a man of meager means to a cold-hearted killer. Sadly, Bob Biswas does not give us an answer to that question. Instead, it gives us a character wiped off his own memories of what he was, making him question himself, his actions like an outsider.

Again, that is not the worst idea on paper. Imagine a person being forced to confront their own corrupt past without any knowledge of how they became so misguided, to begin with. But the film, directed by Divya Annapurna Ghosh, is not focused enough to be about anything in particular beyond a point.

There is a temptation here for the narrative to be an introspective journey, but also a realization that it needs to be a more physical thriller. This makes the film land somewhere in the middle. Neither a tout thriller nor an introspective character study. It does not help that Bachchan, despite being earnest, never looks the part. The accent is practically non-existent, and the complexity of emotions softer than scarring.

Unlike Kahaani, Bob Biswas fails to capture the atmosphere of its city, making the geography as insignificant as Bob’s subsequent kills. Bob Biswas is not entirely a story of the protagonists’ guilt, neither is it a story of his first taste of blood. It is a strange, needless humanizing of a character who was best left unexplored.

Now Streaming on Zee5

Dhamaka Review

The story behind the filming of Dhamaka, Ram Madhvani’s new directorial, is far more interesting than the movie itself. The film was shot entirely during a ten-day schedule during the lockdown. This gives the film its claustrophobic cinematic value that was recently turned into a terrifying watch by the immensely watchable Jake Gyllenhaal. Sadly, Madhvani does not have a compelling actor like Gyllenhaal here, and that is just the tip of the problem with this thriller.

Dhamaka is not a bad movie, and that is why it is so frustrating to see it become a drag as it ticks towards the end of its first hour. Adapted from the 2013 South Korean movie The Terror Live, the film is set in a news-channel office on a day when a man burdened by circumstances decides to blow-up Bandra-Worli Sea Link.

At the thick of things is Arjun Pathak (Kartik Aaryan), once a prime-time reporter now demoted to an RJ, who is on the verge of a divorce from his wife Saumya (Mrunal Thakur). The story revolves around a mysterious caller who threatens to blow the Sea Link and ends up blowing it multiple times through the narrative.

In a country like India, where journalism is a dwindling dream of what-if, Dhamaka could have been a searing reminder of the belief that is instilled in the minds of a common-man by the words of assurance spoken by a journalist on television, juxtaposing it with the ruthless lies, and detailed dramatic flair that ensues behind the camera. There was a lot that writer Puneet Sharma and Madhvani could have done here, but in their obsession for a scene-by-scene adaptation and a complete disregard of including India’s socio-political depth in the narrative, the film keeps meandering in circles without ever reaching a believable tipping point.

This arises from two major problems. Dialogues that remain staged even when the screenplay tries to heighten the tension and a central performance by Kartik Aaryan that feels more forced than ferocious. This is not to say that he does not try. Aaryan tries his best to step out of his comfort zone here, but even at his best, he feels like Kartik Aaryan trying to do a desperate act, than actually living in the moment.

This becomes clearer when his act is positioned against the wonderful screen presence of Amruta Subhash as the arrogant boss of Arjun. She brings the needed coldness to the performance that tries its best to enhance the internal struggle of Arjun. Sadly, Aaryan fails to make the conflict of his character real.

Dhamaka feels like a lost opportunity on a commentary about the floundering condition of media in India. There was immense potential here, and a director like Ram Madhvani has the right chops to be at the director’s seat for something like this (remember his brilliant direction in Neerja), but the film is saddled by its limiting ambition and a forgetful central performance in a film that relied heavily on the lead actor taking a big chunk of the burden of making the film a convincing watch. Sadly, Madhvani fails to do with Aaryan what he so ably did with Sonam Kapoor.

Now streaming on Netflix