Rahul Desai

For a hot second in 2023, the Internet turned on Babil Khan. The young actor, son of the late Irrfan, became the rare nepo-kid who got trolled for saying all the right things. His viral take on romantic relationships — where he batted for gender equality and called out the chauvinistic phrasing of “getting girls” — was treated with suspicion; he was accused of being too rehearsed, too pretentious. Social media was flooded with scrutiny and jokes about performative wokeness and green-flag syndromes. To his credit, Khan leans into this persona for Logout, a cyber thriller in which he plays a famous and chronically online influencer on the brink of breaching the 10-million-followers barrier.

If Chhorii (2021) was an overlong, preachy and screechy horror film centered on female infanticide, Chhorii 2 is an overlong, preachy and screechy horror film centered on child marriage. In a post-Stree world, this social horror template feels a bit hollow without humour — like the cinematic equivalent of a gender studies student on a gap year. The sequel takes place seven years after the events of Chhorii, Vishal Furia’s Hindi remake of his Marathi movie about a pregnant woman (Nushrratt Bharuccha, as Sakshi) who walks away from a patriarchal and baby-killing village with the ex-wife (Pallavi Ajay, as Rani) of her murderous husband. If this sentence sounds complicated, never mind. Just remember that Sakshi is the hero because she went through hell and back to protect her girl-child.

During his second of many uncomplicated rampages in Jaat, Sunny Deol delivers a line that’s his version of Shah Rukh Khan saying, “Before touching the son, deal with the father” in Jawan (2023) or Salman Khan saying, “Politics is not my field, but don’t force me to enter it” in Sikandar (too recent). Deol’s self-referential roar goes: “The North knows this ‘dhaai kilo ka haath,’ now let the South experience it”. It’s a fun idea, if you think about it (but not too much). Deol’s the definitive North Indian hero, a man’s man’s man’s man steeped in Sehwagian clarity: see enemy, hit enemy. Following in the steps of his contemporaries, Jaat is his pan-Indian intro-shot: a hit Telugu director, a coastal Andhra setting, villains from Sri Lanka (not Pakistan), a Jai Shri Ram-song entry on an Ayodhya-bound train, a hulk-smash setup, a mixed cast and crew.

Over its three seasons, The White Lotus has become an American TV franchise that at once satirises the insularity of American affluence and the superiority complex of a social media generation that laps up the satire. Much of the show — its characters, reaction shots, music, monologues, conversations, scandals, twists, weekly episodes — is staged with a sense of the memes, hyper-aware humour and internet buzz it generates. The virality is an inextricable part of the design. It caters to — but also skewers — an average woke viewer’s desire to be seen as well as their disdain towards Western capitalism and anti-intellectualism. We are invited to laugh at rich and culturally oblivious vacationers dispensing the emptiest thought farts with the self-seriousness of 13-year-old cinephiles. Note, for instance, the gravity of the score almost mocks the levity of Sam Rockwell’s hysterically hollow monologue about his sexual awakening (if one can even call it that). But we are also lured into identifying with a couple of ‘outsiders’ — people who think they’re better than everyone else — in each of the seasons. In Season 1, it’s a Black teenager tagging along on a Hawaiian holiday with the wealthy white family of her best friend; it’s also a freelance culture writer who’s newly married into money. In Season 2, it’s a straight-laced lawyer who cringes at the superficiality of her husband’s friends; it’s also a frumpy young assistant of an eccentric heiress on a Sicilian holiday.

Early on in Harshad Nalawade’s Follower, we see its central character, Raghvendra “Raghu” Pawar (Raghu Prakash), commuting to work one morning. It’s an innocuous little routine—a man rides through town on his motorbike. The passing scenery is reminiscent of any tier-2 Indian city: dusty cricket grounds, petrol pumps, bus stops, a giant clock, a flyover under construction, a bridge. A closer look, however, reveals that the streets simmer with unresolved frictions and resolute fictions. Garlanded statues of fabled kings compete for attention with garlanded statues of fabled queens. Flags of clashing political parties and communities dot the statues and bus stops. A lone church shies away in the background. Raghu has the stoic manner of a combatant weaving through the debris of a decades-long dispute. We soon learn that this town, Belgaum, is a war zone of identity.

S. Sashikanth’s Test is yet another story about a celebrity feeling the rage of a common man. It follows Arjun Venkataraman (Siddharth), a legendary Indian cricketer thrown into a crisis. The crisis is manufactured by a bitter scientist, Saravanan (R. Madhavan), who needs money to fend off loan sharks, pay for his wife’s IVF treatment and, most importantly, float a revolutionary hydro-fuel project. The twists are corny and implausible. The Netflix-thriller template flattens the initial promise. There are too many loose ends, abrupt transformations, unnecessary characters, over-the-top performances (Madhavan’s villain era — or Maddy’s baddie era — is just not it), and lazy resolutions. In short, Test is not a great film.

I admire ambition. But ambition without direction can be like an ice cream cone without the ice cream: hollow, weird, tasteless and sad. Sorry for the analogy, but I was left with a sticky cone in my hand after my ice cream scoop met the footpath last week and I’m still salty (not sugary) about it. It wasn’t even a waffle cone. Coming back to Chamak, rarely has so much ambition resulted in so little. It’s a miracle that this musical drama manages to be 12 episodes long without making a Punjab-sized dent in the OTT landscape. The series is disjointed and distracted, but it generously allows the viewer to be just as distracted. I found myself doing some chores, learning of Hollywood star Val Kilmer’s death, watching Real Madrid highlights and reading about the IPL — all of this while six episodes of Chamak: The Conclusion (the first 6 dropped in 2023) played in the background. But the empty cone, in this case, elicits sympathy. It’s a lot of production, money, writing, acting, culture, songs, sound. It’s hard not to feel for a show that works so hard to tell a story.

Given Hindi cinema’s twin obsession with nepotism and nationalism, it’s hard not to be nostalgic about a dopey Salman Khan movie. The badness of a family entertainer like Sikandar is harmless, vintage, candid, pure almost. It has no ulterior motive, no genre, no affiliations; it’s a festival release, but the festival may as well be a Salman Khan release. It’s just there: a 150-minute montage of intro shots and ad slogans parading as punchlines. In other words, Sikandar is a dying breed of Bollywood vice. I’ve kind of missed it. The brain melts, but at least the spirit stays intact. It’s so critic-proof that I’m heaving a sigh of relief as I write this — there’s no prospect of offending anyone because nobody cares. Happy days. Both its villains are bald, so hair propaganda is the closest it comes to taking a stand. The closest it comes to being political is Khan playing a Rajkot resident who (occasionally) speaks Gujarati, a language that gives him a direct line to New Delhi. The closest it comes to meta referencing is when this godly hero delivers its actor’s thoughts while punishing an errant minister: “I don’t know about PM or CM, I can easily be an MLA or MP, but I’m not interested. Don’t force me to be interested”. It’s so strong on fan service that when Khan breaks the fourth wall during an action sequence, he doesn’t look at the camera; the camera looks at him. It even reverses the anxiety around modern technology: the acting all around is so robotic that AI would in fact humanise it.