Rahul Desai

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.

The inherent burden of watching a Hindi remake is that the original film automatically acquires a position of control and, in most cases, invincibility. The source material becomes a point of comparison and judgement: a biblical blueprint that, if not followed, reduces the subjectivity of art to the semantics of love or religion. The adaptation can either “stray” or “be faithful”; its identity can only be determined by its devotion — or a lack of it — to the original. It’s a lose-lose situation of sorts. For instance, Dhadak (2018) not only strayed from Marathi classic Sairat (2016), it was entirely divorced from reality; it invisibilised the central theme and missed the memo. Even in isolation, it was a generic and gutless poor-boy-rich-girl tale.

If aliens abduct me at the end of this week, I will have to be honest and tell them that the last film I watched featured Ajay Devgn dancing with his fingers, Sanjay Mishra casually strangling a cobra before flinging it aside (“go, get well soon, bye”) like it’s a daily routine, the camera entering the eyes of a high-on-poppy-seeds Sharat Saxena to reveal a party of dancing and turban-clad worms, Deepak Dobriyal playing a transwoman so convincingly that I had no idea he was in the film till 30 minutes in, a 70-something British pole dancer who dies while showcasing her talent (“who folded her body?”), Chunky Panday chanting “Pakistan, zindabad!” as a punchline in 2025, and Devgn pretending to be a colonel and narrating scenes from Border (1997) when asked to regale a family of Indian nationalists with anecdotes — where he switches between dialogue of Sunny Deol, Suniel Shetty and Jackie Shroff. The final straw for the aliens might be when they hear that the acronym of the title is SoS: a distress signal disguised as a movie. Just like that, I will be un-abducted.

I remember being traumatised by the mediocrity of The Fantastic Four (2005) and its Silver Surfer sequel (2007), back when superhero movies were still in the ‘Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man’ era. One of my first thoughts, as a red-blooded male teenager, was: Is Jessica Alba really worth the fuss? The Fantastic Four: First Steps is a considerable step up from both the 2000s debacles and the 2015 disaster (I bet you didn’t remember that one — well, neither do Michael Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell and Miles Teller). Granted, that doesn’t take a lot of doing, but as an MCU movie that absolutely ‘needed’ to be made to thicken the chaos of the next Avengers movie, it’s not the worst thing. It’s not the best thing either, but when did Marvel ever pretend to be ambitious within its anti-cinema aesthetic? The Emmy-nominated Martin Scorsese will tell you more.

Imagine a group of strangers launching a Sunday book club. They begin enthusiastically — discovering each other’s tastes, comfort levels, sense of humour, personality and general vibe. Sometimes, they do drinks later and tease each other’s choices (“Sally Rooney? You’re such a hipster”). The possibilities are endless. Then one of them misses a Sunday; the balance is off. Two more drop out the next week. The plan-maker is gone soon. The energy fades. The discussions morph into dull rambles; sometimes, sentences and thoughts start only to get lost along the way. Finally, two members remain; one of them quotes J.K. Rowling. They sit in silence and scroll through their phones until their cabs arrive. They search for a “books to hold performatively in public spaces” list. Rangeen is this book club — united by passion, dismantled by time. The nine-episode series starts with hope. A talented crew, led by Vineet Kumar Singh (in pre-Chhaava mode) and Rajshri Deshpande (Trial by Fire); even Mismatched star Taaruk Raina isn’t miscast like he was in The Waking of A Nation. A solid setup: a self-righteous Hindi scribe named Adarsh (Singh) catches his wife Naina (Deshpande) with a young gigolo (Raina, as Sunny), and their marriage breaks down. The series more or less opens with this incident, so one is left to trace the language of their companionship through their conflict — no happy flashbacks, no spoon-feeding, just resentment and bad decisions and silence.

Like Khauf, Black White & Grey — Love Kills, and Black Warrant earlier this year, Mandala Murders is the kind of Hindi fiction that wouldn’t exist if not for streaming platforms. It isn’t short of ambition or scale; it’s original; it’s conceived with the rules, reach, world-building and timelines of a fantasy novel. The template of two haunted cops investigating a pattern of ritualistic murders in a mysterious town becomes a generational saga of a secret female-led cult, black magic, the fusion of science and divinity, a machine that ingests human thumbs to grant miracles, comatose girlfriends, shadow worshippers, a political rivalry, a ninja-styled and mythical killer, a Frankenstein’s-Monster-coded mission, and a lot more. In fact, 8 episodes later, I’d be hard-pressed to distil the premise into a coherent logline. When one character tells another late in the show that “the answers you seek are beyond your understanding,” I could only nod in vehement agreement. To be fair, it does this without making us feel thick.

In Sarzameen (“beloved land”), an Indian army officer, Colonel Vijay Menon (Prithviraj Sukumaran), is tasked with ending violence in the Valley. The Kashmir-for-Dummies setting aids him. All he must do is “liberate Kashmir from the mysterious terrorist whose code-name is Mohsin”. It’s simple. But Vijay — that Angry Young Man who wears generational rage as his uniform — has a problem. And it’s not Kaabil (K.C. Shankar), the dangerous militant he’s just captured. Vijay has a son, Harman (Ronav Parihar), who stammers. His old-school masculinity cannot accept it; he is ashamed, despite daily implorations from his wife, Meher (Kajol). Naturally, Vijay’s mission reaches a point where he must choose between his abducted son and his country. The colonel makes his choice. (Lest we don’t get it, he acts out his thoughts — always). But it is not without consequences: eight years later, a seemingly radicalised young man named Harman (Ibrahim Ali Khan) returns to his parents. Is he the new Mohsin? Does his trauma matter? Is he cute? Where is his stutter?