Ishita Sengupta

The idea of a second chance is often linked to redemption, an opportunity to right a wrong. In Subhadra Mahajan’s stunningly shot, monochrome feature, Second Chance, the prospect gathers a restorative quality. The filmmaker slows down the immediacy, making second chances more about unlearning than learning. The difference is slight but lends ingenuity to a familiar premise. Nia (Dheera Johnson) is an affluent young woman who has retreated to the hills. Not much information is laid out, but not much is required. The film opens with a black screen, punctuated with her voice – shaky, disillusioned and desperate. She is trying to reach out to someone called Kabir over the phone to inform him that she has taken the pills. The next moment, Nia stands facing the snow-clad mountains. The juxtaposition of her frail being with the towering silhouette informs the narrative context, conveying her existential confinement. Still, the possibility of the ice thawing underlines the spiritual subtext of the film. Mahajan’s feature is as much about finding light at the end of the tunnel as it is about scouring light in the tunnel.

There is something innately awkward about enjoying Akshay Kumar doing comedy. The feeling is similar to reading old scrapbooks and being amused at an earlier version of oneself. Or, meeting someone from the past with thorny opinions and enjoying their company briefly. To enjoy Akshay Kumar doing comedy is to reckon with his problematic brand of humour and appreciate his genius of making even the most worn-out jokes fun. If there is a conundrum here, it is only exemplified in his latest, Housefull 5, a film version of the actor’s absurd hilarity. Nothing about Housefull 5 looked good. The film has 19 actors, an ensemble so off-kilter that it can convince anyone about the dearth of employment in Bollywood. Written by Farhad Samji and Tarun Mansukhani, the thriller comedy has two endings (5A and 5B) in an economy when makers are struggling to end one film well. And, more crucially, it is an extension of a franchise that has a history of mining humor at the expense of every living being except men.

A lot about Karan Tejpal’s Stolen is vague. The landscape looks familiar, but no names are given, and an angry mob keeps gathering steam, but their rooted investment is unclear. A woman claims to be pregnant without a man involved, and a deserted mansion is deemed cursed without a direct reason. Such obscurity feels deliberate. Stolen is as specific as encompassing, as much a story as a statement. The survival thriller is about people and society. There is little novelty about the overlap, but Tejpal’s film, breathless in its pace, straddles the many worlds of its creation with distinct urgency. It manages to hold our gaze close to certain faces while churning the fear of the unknown. The result is a rare film about class that unfolds with its ear close to the ground. One that resists making empty statements by checking its privilege as part of the critique. In that sense, Stolen is eerily reminiscent of Navdeep Singh’s NH10 (2015), a slasher thriller that contained multitudes of horror in its proposition: what happens when the urban enters the lawless rural jungle? What happens when a part of India collides with another? Written by Swapnil Salkar, Gaurav Dhingra and Tejpal, Stolen asks the same questions and keeps addressing them during its runtime.

Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight is a radical beast. It is provocative and outlandish, hilarious and macabre. It is intimately accessible and formidably alienating; it is a dark comedy where the depth of darkness constantly squirms with the possibility of humour. Kandhari’s directorial feature is as much a clutter-breaker as it is a freewheeling venture, making up its mind on the go about what to do with itself after having broken the clutter. Surreal and odd, Sister Midnight is a frighteningly original shape-shifting film that cautiously evades meaning to avoid making sense. One would be tempted to brand it as subversive, but Kandhari’s debut is more defiant in its energy, restive in spirit and endearing at its core. The filmmaker suffuses each frame with sprinting chaos where the refusal to conform takes over everything else, outlining in the process a distinct feminine existence in its absence of coherence.

In Chandan Arora’s Kankhajura, an actor is pitted against the show. This isn’t the story, but the effect. Roshan Mathew plays the protagonist and delivers a performance that is at once suited to the presumed complexity of the series and at odds with the inert ambition of it. The bravura turn uplifts Arora’s work, prompting a reading of what it could have been had it strived harder, and underlines its failure to match up to the merit of its protagonist. Arora is Ashu, a timid young man who stutters when anxious. And, he is anxious all the time. His eyes are perpetually lowered, and his back is slouched like he is pinned against the wall. His defeatist body language suggests decades of bullying, and yet, he was imprisoned for killing someone. The only person who gets him going is his brother, Max (Mohit Raina), a flamboyant builder dissimilar to his sibling in every way. Max is ambitious and reassured, forceful and scheming.

Before breaking out with horror comedies, Maddock Films’ slate consisted largely of social comedies. The production house not just bankrolled them but, through reiteration, set a template where unusual premise offset the familiarity of the messaging. In Bala (2019), social prejudice was addressed through the inventive set-up of an insecure man losing his hair; in Mimi (2020), the complexity of motherhood was conveyed through surrogacy. Bhool Chuk Maaf, their latest film, uses similar embellishment, but the dressing is hollow and the tone is patronising. It is difficult to see through the facade, at least on the surface. Karan Sharma’s film begins on a playful note. Ranjan Tiwari (Rajkummar Rao) and Titli Mishra (Wamiqa Gabbi) want to get married. They have been in love for long, but their parents, mainly hers, are not ready to accept the union. Reasons are plenty, but Titli’s father (the inimitable Zakir Hussain wasted in a one-note role) wants the groom to have a government job. This wouldn’t have posed a problem if Ranjan were a capable man.

Sitting in 2025, a unique problem plagues Hindi cinema: the effort of watching them has trumped the labour of writing about them. While this might imply that the general quality has elevated, thereby making it difficult to unpack films, the opposite is true. The base level of movies has undergone a rapid deterioration of tragic proportions, and although most films in the last four years will reaffirm this proposition, Sangeeth Sivan’s Kapkapiii shines as a leading contender, at least this month. I don’t mean this as a jibe, but referring to Kapkapiii as a film is an overreach. Sure, in a strict sense of moving images, it qualifies, but the frivolity with which it unfolds, the indifference it offers and its absolute resistance to meaning suggest otherwise. Think of it like this: you go to watch a film and all you see is one build-up after another; you take it all in, hoping for a resolution, only for the screen to go blank at the moment of truth. It should have been a frustrating exercise, but even what we see in Kapkapiii makes so little sense that, in retrospect, no exposition could have salvaged it.

Netflix’s The Royals, the series about royalty and their way of life, is a fitting example of everything wrong with the streamer. The new eight-episode show is evidence of its cautious programming and the tendency of backing projects where actors are seen more chilling by the pool than uttering lines, and shot changes are excuses for wardrobe revamps. The Royals is a hallowed congregation of abysmal writing and disinterested filmmaking, and the union is specifically designed to make only one unit suffer: the audience. On paper, it is tempting to like something like The Royals. The stakes are constantly low, and the premise is as far-removed from reality as credible information is from major news studios in India. The aesthetic is pleasing to the eye (the neon-lit colour grading of Netflix, finally, takes a back seat) and the superfluity of the setting is a far cry from the real-life based template-driven true crime shows that have clogged every pore of the streamer’s slate. The triviality also calls for a leeway in expectations that, ideally, should serve a show like this.