Ishita Sengupta

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.

Once in a while, a film comes that breaks even the toughest of the tough. That, when watching, you do not question your existence but the fact that you are still alive. That scoffs at a regular cinephile and vows to teach them a lesson for still wanting to watch Hindi films. Once in a while, a film makes sitting through it an art form and filmmaking into a joke. This year, it is Sidhaant Sachdev’s The Bhootnii. The ’the’ in the title is the only, and the last, semblance of respect the filmmaker offers to anybody associated with the film – actors and audience alike. Everything beyond this unfolds as an assault to the senses and disrespect to the fact of living and the art of surviving. Rage should have made me more coherent, but Sachdev’s film has broken me. If it were a living entity, it would be sitting across and, seeing my lifeless stare into the laptop, celebrating my defeat.

Nothing spells crisis for an industry louder than a film encouraging the reading of being better than what it is. The conclusion stems from both perception and positioning. How one looks at a film is largely coloured by what came before, and where it fits into the larger scheme of things. Currently, Hindi cinema is so riddled with adrenaline and frothing at the mouth with propaganda that Raj Kumar Gupta’s Raid 2, cautious at best and frustrating at worst, might end up as one of the bearable films of the year. But this would be a misreading — and misleading — because Gupta’s new film is as politically inert as it comes. The toothlessness undermines the premise of Raid 2, which, much like its predecessor, follows a government employee standing up to a corrupt politician. If an anti-establishment tone is inherent to the setting, the film unfolds by refusing to acknowledge it. In the filmmaker’s books, a hero is created by the system, and heroism is defined as a compliance with the state apparatus — a blind spot that shapes the parochial narrative.

Jewel Thief has an Abbas–Mustan–shaped hole in it. The specifics are difficult to convey, but the outcome is easy to see. Here are some pointers: there is no plot, only plot twists. Plot twists have twists, and the twists are twisted for more twists. All characters are uniformly smug, and each is afforded a minimum of five backstories. Everyone is outwitting everyone else, and by the time the second round of outwitting begins, logic takes a backseat and having pulpy fun is the goal.