Rahul Desai

Most film-makers use craft to tell stories. But some use stories to craft unfilmable feelings. Nidhi Saxena did it in her feature-length debut, Sad Letters of an Imaginary Woman, which had its world premiere at Busan last year. The life of a middle-aged caregiver and her ailing mother in a crumbling ancestral home became a medium to explore the transience of memories, trauma, loneliness and everything in between. The montage of a character recording whispers and past sounds from the walls of her house with a boom mic can seem strange — pretentious, even (the house in ‘arthouse’). But it encouraged us to renegotiate their relationship with the act of watching a movie. The orthodox need to interpret fiction made way for a sensory experience of understanding life itself. Imagine the screen speaking to the viewer in a different language: where expression comes disguised as an aesthetic.

Inspired by the life of Kashmir’s first female playback singer Raj “Noor” Begum, Songs of Paradise stars Saba Azad as the young protagonist Zeba Akhter in the 1950s, and Soni Razdan as the old legend who narrates her story to a thesis-writing student named (of course) Rumi. We know he’s passionate about music because he strums a guitar absent-mindedly in public. Much of the film is concerned with Zeba’s rise from a modest wedding singer to the voice of Radio Kashmir in a conservative setting where women aren’t allowed to dream beyond marriage and housework. A few good men along the way enable her generational talent: a progressive father (Bashir Lone) who works as a woman’s tailor, a renowned Ustad (Shishir Sharma) who trains her for free, and an artful lyricist and mentor (Zain Khan Durrani, as Azaad) who goes on to marry her. The naysayers are familiar: a regressive mother (Sheeba Chaddha) who sees her daughter as someone’s future property, a community that mocks the parents for allowing the girl to do ‘Western’ things, a radio station director (Armaan Khera) whose cynicism melts away, and a society that’s yet to decode the concept of independence.

A pack of teenage schoolgirls wreak havoc across a city. They overpower everyone and everything in sight, seemingly possessed by superhuman strength and violent desire. The attack is visceral and unstructured, like the beginning of a dance rehearsal gone wrong. Their school uniforms become a symbol of danger. The police are clueless; the parents are terrified. The setting is notoriously sexist, so the sight of them spreading chaos is oddly empowering. In most movies, it would be. But Vash Level 2 is not most movies. The sequel to Vash (2023), Krishnadev Yagnik’s national award-winning supernatural thriller that was remade as Shaitaan (2024) in Hindi, our simplistic perception of female empowerment is thrown out of the window (or, well, off a terrace). Even their “rebellion” is defined by subservience; their agency is shaped by the crippling lack of one. For they are actually controlled by a sinister male stranger (Hiten Kumar) who laced their lunch with black-magic dust. The rampage is happening against the girls’ wishes; their bodies are weaponised but their minds are scared. Most of them attack hawkers, motorists and street-dwellers and bash their heads in, regardless of gender or status. The smash-the-patriarchy allegory unfolds like a cruel joke. The brainwashing and societal-conditioning metaphors unfold like punchlines.

Momo Deal opens with the voice of a dead girl at her funeral. Except it’s quirky. This young woman, Mahima (Anushka Kaushik), is reading out her own wishlist for the funeral — the way any manic-pixie hall of famer like Jab We Met’s Geet might (we learn that her favourite song is “Tumse hi”) to lighten the mood. One zoom-out of the camera reveals that none of Mahima’s wishes have been followed, especially the one that demands her best friend Naman (Akashdeep Arora) to weep loudly at the front. Naman is instead numb. His deadpan face suggests he’s an action hero who can’t act, but he’s something more common: an Indian man who can’t — or won’t — express himself. He refuses to cry. Dheeraj Jindal’s 13-minute short then features a late-night conversation between Naman and the ghost of his newly-deceased bestie. They walk the streets of their hometown, Jaipur, and exchange difficult emotions.

Weapons opens and closes with a kid’s voiceover, but the anonymity of this narrator kind of ties into the film’s thematic fluidity. As viewers, we are simply wired to look for social cues, for hints and allegories. Weapons knows this and toys with our instincts. The meaning — or lack of it — lies in the eyes of the beholder. The horror in the film becomes anything we want it to be. For some, it could be a self-aware take on community trauma and urban isolation. For some, it could be a nifty riff on our biases about witchcraft and creepy relatives. For some, it could be a naughty satire on our perception of true-crime and supernatural stories. For some, it’s the wicked title, where the emotional ‘weaponisation’ of an entire town on edge prevents them from looking in the most obvious places. The twist — of a fragile outsider arriving to cast a voodoo over victims and turn them into literal weapons — is an entertaining rendition of this simple idea.

Cold on the heels of Mandala Murders, Andhera (“darkness”) is yet another supernatural thriller that ends up becoming a cautionary tale on narrative ambition. This genre of horror is so shapeless that, if the theme isn’t as culturally focused as a Khauf or even an Asur, it tends to spiral into several directions without doing justice to any. It’s like a batsman who keeps swinging big — regardless of the match situation — under the pretext of “intent”. It doesn’t help that Andhera is one of the longest Hindi shows of the year. Or perhaps its 8 episodes feel longer because the world-building just never stops building; it’s not a good sign when a central character says “we were wrong all along” in the penultimate episode. It’s obvious that I’ve run out of patience because I usually don’t hit the ground running with criticism in the opening paragraph. I like some suspense and world-building too. But life is short and, if the title is anything to go by, I’m one typo away from reviewing the suburb I live in (Andheri).

On (very expensive) paper, War 2 continues the trademarks of the YRF Spy Universe. The globe-trotting reaches a point where it’s just showing off: Japan, Spain, Italy, Abu Dhabi, Switzerland, probably Siberia. Characters dare not meet in a non-exotic (or local) landscape; conversations that could be emails happen in ice caves too. The set-pieces feature cobblestoned car chases, a snowy samurai slaughterhouse (with two expressive wolves), physics-mocking airplane action, speeding train accidents, ships and speedboats on F1 tracks, even cable cars. I’m almost afraid to see the passports of the production crew. There’s plenty of homoerotic tension parading as male friendship (level: one rod pierces two bodies), a dance-off, furtive glances above the clouds, tragic lines like “I couldn’t belong to anybody — not even my country — after you”.

Court Kacheri does a lot right for its first three (out of five) episodes. It unfolds as a legal dramedy that questions its own identity. The young protagonist, Param (Ashish Verma), is a reluctant second-generation lawyer by virtue of being the son of a popular senior advocate, Harish Mathur (Pawan Malhotra). Param detests the profession — he’s seen his dad entertain all kinds of criminals, shady clients and corrupt politicians over the years. All he wants to do is leave for either Dubai or Canada, but a Police Clearance Certificate (PCC) becomes a conflict after he’s caught in a fake-marksheet scam. Basically, he’s a nepo-baby who can’t handle the pressure of legacy. The outsider, Suraj (Puneet Batra), is Harish’s loyal assistant. Unlike Param, he wishes he was his mentor’s son with silver-spoon privileges; his passion for law sees him hustle to start a secret practice with a friend (Amarjeet Singh) behind Harish’s back. In short, there’s a toxic patriarch and two boys desperate to escape his shadow and become their own men.