Rahul Desai

Coming-of-age enthusiasts used to accuse Imtiaz Ali of telling one story over and over again. Lapsed horror enthusiasts like myself might accuse director Vishal Furia of being in the same boat. His latest, Maa (“mother”), is supposed to share a universe with Vikas Bahl’s Shaitaan (2024), but it’s actually Furia’s Chhorii 2 (which released in April) on a backpacking trip across West Bengal. Both movies feature a single mom from a city having to defy the demonic forces of an ancestral village to protect her girl-child. The daughter’s sacrifice (and first period) holds the key to uncurse the place. If the supernatural offender was a Tumbbad-coded prehistoric creature in Chhori 2, Maa’s baddie is a needy tree monster who looks a lot like Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy. I could swear that the haunted Banyan tree in Maa — beset with the cries of slaughtered babies — is the one from last month’s The Bhootnii. The visual effects are better, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing anymore. Maa stars Kajol as the titular parent who must transform into Goddess Kali to defeat the sinister descendant of the Raktabija. It takes two hours to set up this face-off, becoming yet another notch in the belt of a film industry that keeps staging supernatural tales about feminism and empowerment (the Hindi titles have exhausted all variations of “woman,” “mother,” “daughter” and “girl”) to offset the performative ironies of the natural world — in this case, a country notoriously unsafe for the female form. Maa overcompensates to a point where it’s hard to tell fantasy from reality.

On our school’s Sports Day, the inter-house cycle race — especially after the success of Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar — would be the most anticipated event. Excited students would line up the oblong track an hour in advance. It was a weekend finale of sorts; everyone wondered who the new ‘Sanju’ would be. It was all about the need for speed. But my favourite event was a relatively unheralded one: the slow-cycling race. I enjoyed the skill and balance required to reach the finish line last without stopping. The best of them would find ways to crawl, manage motion, and make the most of the track — a minute-long nutshell of life itself.

Detective Sherdil is a remarkably annoying film. It’s the kind of over-the-top detective drama that tries to be playful, weird and campy to conceal its alarming lack of substance. It’s a whodunnit that leaves the viewer wondering who the film-makers are, not who the killer is. Even as a Knives Out-coded murder mystery (a line in Sherdil’s intro rap goes “Sherlock and Bakshi could never compare!”), it makes a mockery of the format. The supersleuth spends the last 30 minutes explaining the entire plot to us under the guise of revealing his findings to the killer(s). Except it never sounds like he’s decoded the case; he just magically knows everything. There is barely any sense of how he figures it out — he just did, down to the finest detail of what every character was thinking. The film buries this lazy writing beneath a deafening background score and some of the most disorienting comic-book-style editing in recent memory. The transitions are so unserious that it’s hard to tell which shot a character is in.

The nostalgia of Aamir Khan is hard to resist. He’s a one-man publicity machine. He resists streaming models. He bats for the theatrical experience. He is open about his failures and flaws. In an age of jingoistic fervour, bloated superstar spectacles and franchise cashgrabs, he produces and acts in a modest sports dramedy about a wayward basketball coach training a team of neurodivergent players (played, for once, by neurodivergent performers) for a national tournament. There’s no meta hero-entry shot; it’s just his character, Gulshan, matter-of-factly parking his car outside a stadium. He plays an unlikable man who isn’t afraid to look ordinary. In an industry ripe with hypermasculinity and vanity, he pokes fun at his own height and physicality — Gulshan is trolled as a “tingu” (shorty), even by his mom. He leads an old-fashioned remake full of newcomers and youngsters. And he’s an underdog after being ahead of the curve for years.

Grief is too absolute an entity in cinema. Like joy, disappointment and love, it’s often treated as a ‘phase’ in a story: a striking part of a whole. It is seen and staged, either as a brooding montage or an atmospheric song or a transformative conflict or a sullen flashback about a character’s retreat from civilisation (think mainstream movies like Jab We Met). But grief — or its more familiar version, heartbreak — is actually a part of a hole. The pain is abstract, undefined, still, and often, violently simple. In Subhadra Mahajan’s Second Chance, this simplicity is laid bare. It’s not a time in life but life itself. It’s not a phase in a story but storytelling itself.

CELINE SONG’S Materialists opens in a cave. In a past life, perhaps. A caveman offers a ring made of flowers to a cavewoman; she is moved by his proposal. All they need is love — and a tiny material consummation of it. It’s a sweet and wordless sequence. The film instantly switches to the high-tempo Manhattan life of 35-year-old matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson). She is a master at “dating math”: ticking boxes, reducing surnames to alphabets, catering to clients’ dreams, perpetuating the dehumanisation of modern dating. The abrupt cut from the past to the present — or the present to the future — reveals both evolution and the erasure of it. Back then, it was a symbol. Now it’s a status symbol. It’s a swift but suggestive transition. Somewhere along the way, capitalism in the age of love slowly repositioned itself as love in the age of capitalism.

A spin-off in the John Wick universe, Ballerina stars Ana de Armas as Eve, a young orphan trained by the Ruska Roma — the crime organisation famous for creating Keanu Reeves’ Wick — to be a ballerina-assassin. She is taught to weaponise her intuition and “fight like a girl” instead of trying to defeat men at their own game. She graduates the programme and starts work as a cold-blooded contract killer. But just as she sets out to become the next big Ruska Roma legend, she is overcome by an urge to avenge the murder of her father. All the trauma comes back to her when she identifies an opponent bearing the symbol of the Cult, the outfit responsible for the death of her parents all those years ago. Her ‘mission’ changes.

A whole lot of nothing happens in Season 2 of Rana Naidu, the Indian adaptation of Ray Donovan. The first season (2023) was populist and provocative for the heck of it, what with its look-maa-sex-gore-expletives rhythms. But at least it was a world-building phase, where fan service prevailed (the casting coup of a star uncle-nephew duo) and viewers could be introduced to the concept of a badass Hyderabadi “fixer” in Mumbai, his daddy issues, and the endless struggle to fix his own family. It was like watching a celebrity gossip column posing as an OTT-template action thriller. A slog, but a new one.