CAST : Rajkummar Rao, Sanya Malhotra, Dalip Tahil, Shilpa Shukla, Milind Gunaji
DIRECTED BY: Dr Sailesh Kolanu
This movie is a Hindi remake of the Telugu film of the same name by the same Director.
Vikram (Rajkummar Rao) is an officer at the Homicide Intervention Team in Rajasthan, with an extremely traumatic past. The past trauma takes a toll on his health and affects his work. Despite his doctor and girlfriend Neha’s (Sanya Malhotra) plead, Vikram doesn’t want to quit the job. He decides to take a 3-month holiday instead.
When Vikram goes away, a girl named Preeti goes missing, and the case goes to HIT. Neha, who finds a clue in her case, also goes missing. Vikram has to end his holiday abruptly and return to work on the case. Every person, including him, is a suspect with a motive. The movie in a very television like whodunit leads us layer by layer to figure out who the culprit might be.
The Director seems to be in no rush to take you to his hook because in his mind he is creating a franchise and he has a lot of time to tell his narrative but as an audience that delay is frustrating and agonizing.
He touches upon a lot of topics in a short time. Extremely clichéd plot narratives like safety in women, the societal gaze and judgement over their choice of clothes and so on but he does not take any of these to their conclusion.
The remake sticks to safety by following the OG as much as possible without recreating the North Indian version with some local sensibilities.
The narrative becomes more complex in the second half but as crime story aficionados we kept guessing the next move and much to our surprise the plot became extremely predictable and less surprising. The long-drawn-out suspense just fizzled out.
RajKummar Rao portrays Vikram’s anger, fear, pain, loss very effortlessly and it is his movie all the way.
We don’t know what Sanya Malhotra is doing here as she has a very limited space to perform and an even limited screen time.
The movie could have been edited a wee bit tighter to elevate the thrill of the whodunit. The long run time is a dampener to the momentum of events.
