 |
| Shaitan thriller |
Set in modern Mumbai (named after the goddess Mumbadevi, who, according to one of the main protagonists, Amrita “Amy” Jaishankar, looks “so pretty”), the movie talks about the lives of seven people – Amy (Kalki Koechlin), with a traumatic childhood, Dushyant “Dash” Sahu (Shiv Pandit) who has a penchant for drugs and bigger penchant for living life on the edge, Zubin (Neil Bhoopalam), a tech geek with issues of sexual frustration.
Tanya Sharma (Kirti Kulhari) is a disturbed and irritated woman who’s trying to find her own individual voice in the midst of all the noise in her personal life, and Karan “KC” Chaudhary (Gulshan Devaiah), who lives in the moment, and doesn’t have any control over his emotions, be it sex or anger,
Inspector Arvind Mathur (Rajeev Khandelwal), whose tumultuous personal life has driven him to suspension due to anger management issues, and police officer Malwankar (Raj Kumar Yadav), who is torn between his duty and the temptation of money – and their journey down the road of no rules, where one incident changes everyone’s lives, putting everyone of them in a wild, wild frenzy to get back to safer shores, by hook or by crook.
From its very core you can see that Nambiar has worked very hard on each aspect of the movie’s concept and characters. Right from Amy’s intensely written and researched on character to Malwankar’s vulnerable side to Mathur’s angry side, to Dash’s venomous inner demon he keeps as pet, you get so absorbed in the storyline so much so that it’s difficult for you not to feel any of the inner emotions each character’s mind is swirling through. Each character has been paid equal attention onto, so that none of them give you any sort of question mark in your head for any moment in the film where the character reacts in a certain way. It’s in their nuances, in their habits, their swagger. And you just cannot complain with their highly erratic behavior they’ve got seeped inside of them like salt in saltwater.
The movie is, in its soul, an international film, with each emotion acting like an intense Nolan scene, each frame reaching up there to David Fincher’s standards, and each part of the character’s psychedelia overdrive bringing out the Tarantino in Nambiar. On its own vague surface it acts out a thriller, but deep inside, you know the movie’s not just that, and classifying it’s genre as thriller will be an outright insult to the film, which is more about the deranged demon inside everyone: you, me, the person sitting beside you in the cinema hall you’re in, the person you might be talking to – anyone. And you can relate to the howsoever-delinquent stuff they do; drugs, sex, theft and robbery, bunking classes, and the fast life; no holds barred.
Nambiar has left no stone unturned and hasn’t shied away from showing what most filmmakers would normally shy away from showing; particularly the border of sexual frustration Bhoopalam’s character Zubin takes out on gameplay, or even the wild momentary anger KC gets, ruining whatever everyone around him got left with them. Even the minor comic side-story of Dash’s close friend “Shomu” (played hilariously by Rajat Barmecha), is brilliantly executed and doesn’t really look like a sudden interjection to the plot – in fact it moves the plot forward. Kudos to writers Nambiar and Megha Ramaswamy for creating a tight screenplay that doesn’t really give us any time to breathe at all.
Dialogues by Abhijit Deshpande connect well with the raw and rustic Hinglish of the youth of today which doesn’t shy away from being brash and opinionated, even if they’ve got to use slang to prove their point. Mumbai as a location gives the movie that edge. Right from the production design to the art direction of the film, everything is kept raw, eerily grounded, and hard-hittingly realistic. Effective use of guerilla filmmaking can be seen in the tense edge that holds through chase sequences and other action sequences in the film.
Sometimes, whenever you’re treated to films with brilliantly executed concepts, you might just not get that technical, visual satisfaction that you’d want from it (consider the choppy editing in an otherwise terrific Yeh Saali Zindagi). And then there are times when you’ve got the style, the technical brilliance, the locations and the likes, but you just don’t get why the people haven’t paid much attention to the storyline (which is what has happened to films like the deranged Hindi action flick Cash, or the recent Hollywood hogwash Priest, as examples). But this film, while being absolutely high up there in content, doesn’t compromise even one bit in the technical department. Camerawork is brilliant! Never before do you see the camera moving in circles, making the whole frame look topsy-turvy (a brilliant connect to the film’s moral element).
Exceptional lighting and terrific color grading in the post stages make each and every second look beautiful, and heart stopping. The fact that the makers have chosen to shoot every frame in high frame-rate with a suitable shutter speed for smooth movement, has given the editors immense freedom to make slow motion shots with absolutely punchy colors, thereby giving the viewers that dark,
delectable flavor, with that jaw-dropping impact. And the best part is these shots aren’t for gimmickry, they blend in beautifully within the narrative, thereby opening the doors of visual splendor in such a high-concept film like this. And it’s not just the camerawork Poonam Pandey Sexy,
it’s the terrific framing of shots, with each shot very well visualized by the DOP R. Madhi, in collaboration with their storyboard artist. Right from the extreme close-ups to the absolutely crazy angles in some shots, you just know that each shot holds a very different sub textual value that might change by the number of times you watch the film. Music is so well-placed that no single track sounds out of place!
