Rahul Desai

The prominence of a crocodile in the promo material of Tu Yaa Main made me nervous. Don’t get me wrong. I love crocodiles. I’ve always had a soft spot for them; they like sunning and relaxing, and their snouts make it look like they’re always smiling. Before you think I’m weird (I am), there’s another reason for my fondness. You see, crocodiles have often gotten the short end of the stick at the movies. Unlike their more renowned colleagues — the dinosaur, the godzilla, the shark, the kong — they’ve rarely been the star of creature features. They’re often relegated to violent cameos in stories that don’t consider them agile enough to carry a whole film. Even the athletic ones in Mohenjo Daro and Phir Aayi Haseen Dillruba got a raw deal. That’s just reptile racism. So the publicity campaign of this film felt too good to be true. Given the names associated — director Bejoy Nambiar and Aanand L. Rai’s Colour Yellow Productions — I fully expected the crocodile to be a twisted gimmick. A red herring. Maybe the croc is hallucinatory, or worse, a brand prop (Lacoste?) used by two reckless influencers to go viral.

There is no dearth of slow-burning crime dramas in India. Every other show is a gloomy police procedural with an identical template: one gory case, two mismatched detectives, personal lives that reflect the subtext of the whodunit, and an investigation that doubles up as the postmortem of a country. The anticipation of the twist becomes its own cat-and-mouse game between the film-makers and the audience. The genre fatigue is real; it’s easier to blend into this fog of atmospheric puzzles than stand out. But Kohrra 2, much like Kohrra (2023), manages to do both at once. You sense the genre was invented for stories like these — stories where even the red herrings are just as socially valid as the reveal; stories where every detour supplies different shades of truth; stories where a place unfolds as an accumulation of time and not an isolated setting; stories where noir is nothing but reality persevering. It’s exceptionally staged, performed and written: a masterclass in suspense as a subset of cultural curiosity rather than narrative momentum. Its one-hour-long finale is close to television perfection. And it trusts the oppression of blending in over the tragedy of standing out.

“A manhole cleaner and vegetable vendor fall in love during secret meetings in a train bathroom” is a great one-liner. Especially for an indie made on a shoestring budget. Especially in an India that’s gotten too real and complicated for love stories to make sense. It’s even better if said India then gatecrashes the love story, revealing why the title contains the term “Ki Kahani (the story of)” rather than the Bollywood-coded “Ki Prem Kahani (the love story of)”. With those like Pinaki (Sanjay Bishnoi) and Mariyam (Eshita Singh), it’s not falling for each other that’s the conflict; it’s the audacity to fall for each other that is.

The opening minutes of Vadh 2 feature a surprisingly tender moment. It’s past midnight in a prison complex in the wilderness of Madhya Pradesh. A wall separates the female and male wards. Manju Singh (Neena Gupta), a senior inmate of 28 years, sits on one side of the wall and chats with Shambunath Mishra (Sanjay Mishra), a long-time constable, from the other side. It’s a ‘blind’ date of sorts; they can’t see each other, but it’s a routine etched from decades of familiarity (he’s the official bootlegger) and friendship (her friends refer to him as her “aashiq”). Under the stars, they discuss each other’s life now. Her term is ending and she doesn’t want to leave; he speaks of loneliness and offers her a bottle on his birthday. You feel for the old ‘couple’: united by shackles, divided by freedom. They could be a film on their own. One of the merits of Vadh 2 is that it never loses sight of this little film. It’s a moment that echoes across a story that keeps expanding: a moment that keeps reclaiming the eyes of companionship from the jaws of a crime thriller.

Sam Raimi’s Send Help stars Rachel McAdams as Linda Liddle, a disgruntled corporate employee who finds herself stranded on an island with the sexist young CEO of the company after his private jet crashes into the ocean. She’s the better survivalist (Survival is literally her favourite reality series), so the power dynamic is reversed on the island — and she starts to enjoy it a bit too much. Her injured but smug boss, Bradley, begins to rely on her like the volleyball Wilson might have depended on Tom Hanks in Cast Away. She likes his dependence. At some point, the two even threaten to enter romcom territory, what with the days and weeks of cohabiting and building sheds and cooking and hunting together. That’s how it goes: the two enemies fall in love, and their differences are fetishised.

By now, it’s clear that the Mardaani franchise — which revolves around supercop SSP Shivani Shivaji Rao (Rani Mukerji) and her patriarchy-smashing badassery — is known for its villains. Not unlike the other baddie-steals-the-show YRF action franchise, Dhoom. Unlike the Dhoom movies, though, the Mardaani trademark is that it handpicks relatively anonymous (male) talent and propels them into the limelight. Mardaani (2014) thrived on its slick and urban Wall Street-capitalist-coded mastermind; Tahir Raj Bhasin made quite the splash. Mardaani 2 (2019) pivoted to the opposite end of the spectrum; it relied on a light-eyed hinterland psychopath, gamely played by Vishal Jethwa. Given that these characters are largely created and written by men, it’s perhaps by design that they outshine the star of these movies.

I like how Daldal opens. A woman is seated with her older friend at a local bakery. She does not look pleased; they’re discussing a love poem written by a boy across from them. Her friend teases her. They’re used to his lecherous gaze. Suddenly the two women get a call and leave. We soon learn that they were actually ACP Rita Ferrera (Bhumi Pednekar) and sub-inspector Indu Mhatre (the ever-watchable Geeta Agrawal Sharma) waiting to raid a brothel in Mumbai’s red-light area. The boy was actually a student, because Rita had infiltrated the area as an undercover teacher. It’s one thing for Rita to pretend to be someone else, it’s another for the series itself to pretend that she’s someone else. After the raid, we see her come home to a fiancè cooking dinner. He brings her some wine. We expect her to soften. Within seconds, we learn that this is, in fact, a couple on the verge of separation; one of them is moving out. This is a recurring trick — it shows us the expectation panel before hitting us with reality. It’s like even the camera is not in on the illusion: it bakes the average Indian viewer’s conditioning and gaze into the film-making. This extends to the end of the episode. The dual identity of a killer is revealed; the victims, too, seem to be older males who hide behind the veil of virtue.

In Tumbbad director Rahi Anil Barve’s second film, stories are told in a cinema hall. Quite literally. A few characters reminisce, rage, narrate, perform and lie in a decrepit Mumbai movie theater named Mayasabha; they may be projecting, but the blank screen is witness to the telling and untelling of their stories. The place looks halfway abandoned between suffocating reality and misty mythology: like a penniless single-screen auditorium that gave up on its own allegorical significance (as Mahabharata’s Hall of Illusions). It is also “home” to a once-famous and now-unhinged film producer, Parmeshwar Kumar (Jaaved Jaaferi). He lives in the past but scoffs at history.