A painful watch

It cannot get darker- blacker in fact, morbid and macabre. We have the dark streets of Mumbai drawn out and stretched before us by Anurag Kashyap.

You sometimes wonder what all the upheaval was about with ‘Udta Punjab’. In comparison, that seems like the scriptures. One would have thought that the filmmaker is seasoned enough to let his shoot go through the vigilance of a good editor.

A thriller dealing with gory murders, blood and negation all over for 140 minutes is poor understanding of the human element or is a sad essay of the same.

This celebration of evil is the filmmaker’s choice or the area of his convenience. Be that as it may, the amazing performances notwithstanding, the narration gets too dark and toxic.

It could well be anathema to the common concept of entertainment or even to a moral caretaker’s stance on what should be up for viewing at the theatres but he runs constantly at the debased abyss of human nature and it becomes counterproductive.

However, one would have to grant him his space and perhaps he is echoing what Herman Hesse says, “For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things were this contentment, healthiness and comfort, carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.”

The protagonist Raman (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is a psychic killer on the prowl. He in fact walks up to the police station and confesses that he has already killed nine victims.

The police however do not believe him initially but do lock him up and start torturing him. He escapes and gets back to the streets. Invariably his victims are from the slums. However, some that he targets are not really products of his injured psyche. His earliest victim is an uncle of his who physically abused him in childhood.

He then turns his attention on his sister (Amrutha Subash) and her husband (Ashok Lokhande). He gate crashes into their tenement and tortures them.

The entire episode is stomach wrenching and you just want to look the other way. He goes about smothering them with an iron rod, his weapon. He is also in search of his soul mate and finds one in Raghavan (Vicky Kaushal). Strangely the soul mates are on two sides of the fence.

One is the killer on the go and the other is a drug addict police officer who is also having an affair with Smritilika Naidu
( Shobita Dhulipala).

Raman starts stalking the couple, kills the latter’s maid and her family in the process of procuring the key to her apartment. Yet again he challenges the police and gets into the confession cell and throws up the challenge to Raghavan- himself a product of an abusive Dad (Vipin Sharma).

One cannot miss the influence of Harry Haller's Records (For Madmen Only) or simply Hesse’s Steppenwolf and the crisis of morality.
Watch the film for an awe inspiring performance and a reiteration of the class of Nawazuddin.

Minutes into the film there is a wonderful soliloquy from the master actor and from then till the very end the film revolves compulsively around his brilliance and the angst of the filmmaker. Take it if you have an appetite for the bitter.

Raman Raghav 2.0

Cast : Vicky Kaushal, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Shobhita Dhulipala
Direction : Anurag Kashyap
Genre : Thriller

By:L Ravichander