Rahul Desai

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.

Just like the Bhagat Singh story became a first-come-first-serve race for Bollywood historicals in the early 2000s, the Bangladesh Liberation War became the medium to stage Indian patriotism a few years ago. This month marks the beginning of a new period device for Hindi productions: the spymaster story. The recent Salaakar did its clumsiest best to fictionalise the career of India’s National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval. The role of an intelligence agent who sabotages Pakistan’s covert mission to go nuclear in the 1970s is reduced to a series of tacky espionage cliches and cultural stereotypes. It even uses two timelines to double the sense of victory.

Wednesday Season 2 (Part 1: the first four episodes) arrives nearly three years after the goth-deadpan teenager and her morbid adventures became the most watched Netflix show of all time. Immortalised (not a term these characters are fond of) by actress Jenna Ortega, a death-coded Wednesday Addams saved her unmerry school of outcasts, the Nevermore Academy, by cracking a murder mystery and discovering that the boy she liked is a serial-killing monster puppeted by a psychopathic botany teacher. Season 2 takes an interesting route, more or less writing the new-age popularity of the series into its storyline. It opens with a Sixth-Sense-weds-Unbreakable tribute — extra marks for that — to show that Wednesday has learnt to control her psychic powers. She returns to Nevermore for the Fall semester. Except now she’s famous — and it annoys the hell out of her. Everyone knows her, and as an aspiring writer, it gets on her numbed nerves.

Sometimes it takes less than a minute to realise that something is going downhill. It could be a tacky shot, a corny line, a childish sound cue or an awkward actor; broken craft is the first (and only) indicator. But when it takes less than 30 seconds to realise that an entire show is going downhill, the day ahead can be long and sobering. The politics don’t matter; the theme is futile; the genre is secondary; the bigotry takes a backseat. It just becomes impossible to engage with at a basic level of storytelling. All you can do is befriend your fate and hope for the least damage.

In this streaming era, I’m suspicious about stories set in the 1990s and early 2000s. When nostalgia becomes the only selling point, it’s hard to enjoy the curated slice-of-life-ness. I’m also wary of the term ‘Mindie’ (mainstream+indie): a tonal signifier of low-budget productions with a commercial pitch. Ankur Singla’s Ghich Pich (a colloquial term for “emotional turmoil”) is a Mindie marinating in post-liberalisation nostalgia. The year is 2001, the setting is Chandigarh. Posters of Chandrachur Singh, Sonali Bendre and Shawn Michaels dot the coming-of-age narrative of three teen friends in the late-night-drives and single-ring-on-landline phase of their lives. Board exams are around the corner; middle partings, blissful ignorance (“I’ve heard it spreads through eye contact,” whispers a kid about homosexuality), pre-digital innocence (“Kiss? No, my love for her is pure,” a boy declares) and letters inked in blood are all the rage.