Rahul Desai

I’ve chuckled a grand total of two times across five instalments of the Housefull franchise. It says something that, in both instances, the gag involved an animal (not the film). No humans were harmed in the making. The snoring crocodile from Housefull 2 (2012) broke through my defences. I have a fondness for crocodiles (on screen), so to hear one snore in his post-lunch sleep was a dream come true I never knew I needed. In Housefull 5, it’s a parrot named Gucci that attacks a man who killed said parrot’s dad in one of the previous films — all of this scored to the Om Shanti Om soundtrack, lest we assume that only human characters are allowed to have reincarnation revenge tracks. Two men team up to bodyslam Gucci and pin him down to the count of three like a wrestler. I might have also grinned when Akshay Kumar smashes his fingers and Jackie Shroff gives him a guitar to make music out of those quivering fingers. It’s an inspired piece of inanity in a Bollywood franchise that feasts on the lowest hanging fruits.

Stolen tells an NH10-coded story of two city-slicking brothers who — in trying to aid a police investigation of a stolen baby from a rural railway station — get sucked into a heartland nightmare. A drowsy Gautam (Abhishek Banerjee) waits in his black SUV to pick up his younger sibling, Raman (Shubham Vardhan), whose train arrives late. Before they exit the platform, they bump into Jhumpa Mahato (Mia Maelzer), a distraught young mother who accuses Raman of abducting her toddler while she was asleep. The cops get involved; the confusion comes to light. Much to Gautam’s chagrin, Raman is consumed by an urge to help the woman. But they pay the price for being human. Things spiral quickly in a search that features a cursed manor, rehab center, angry mobs, baby-snatching gangs and illegal surrogacy rackets. The brothers find themselves trapped in a dark survival thriller. The question that emerges, however, is troubling: whose survival?

Sister Midnight is unlike anything I’ve seen before. I mean that in both a good way and bad way. It’s the kind of droll, deadpan, disorienting and daringly designed film where the camera is as socially awkward as the characters it films — like an anachronistic Wes Anderson video trapped by the audiovisual rhythms of Mumbai. People face the lens and speak like humanoids; absurd things happen in strikingly staged night-time incidents; the city behaves like a grainy and reluctant painting; everyone acts wild and unpredictable. It’s also the cinematic equivalent of an offbeat person who hides their vulnerability behind a barrage of provocative cues. If we question them for not staying with an emotion longer than a few seconds, they counter-question us for being so uptight. The joke is supposed to be those who find the film increasingly bizarre and difficult to watch. For better or worse, its relationship with the average viewer is part of its conceit.

When you hear that a film made ten years ago is getting a long-delayed release, preconceived notions take over. The same set of thoughts emerge: it’ll be dated, it’ll have the small-film-with-a-big-heart syndrome, it’ll be an indie asking for sympathy, it’ll be have intentions than craft. It can be worse when it’s a children’s film — you almost expect it to revolve around a cycle or an unattainable toy or the pursuit of little-things happiness with sad-violin music. Chidiya, too, revolves around two brothers from a Mumbai chawl — 9-year-old Shanu (Svar Kamble) and 5-year-old Bua (Ayush Pathak) — who want to play a game whose name they don’t know. It involves a shuttlecock and two rackets. They spend days trying to hustle together a net, some space, and most of all, some time. Their struggle features a few quirky characters from the neighbourhood. See what I mean?

The last few years have been spent watching the downfall of mainstream Hindi cinema. I’ve reviewed so many atrocious Bollywood movies that I often sound like a bitter Indian dad citing the example of the exemplary “Sharma-ji Ka Beta” when I write about a foreign film. I can’t help but compare — and wave my finger disapprovingly at my litter. But once in a while, an absolutely horrid Hollywood movie like Karate Kid: Legends arrives (last year it was Madame Web), and all feels right with the world. The mediocrity is almost soothing because, as an Indian cinephile, it doesn’t feel so lonely anymore. They can be just as bad as us; it feels so nice to say that. We’re all in this together: divided by borders but united by bad cinema.

If Mumbai feels too real to be cinematic, New Delhi feels too cinematic to be real. Every life is cursed to be a story; every person sounds like a character. Dilli Dark scrutinises these illusions and fictions of the Indian capital through the lens of an outsider. The outsider is Michael Okeke (Samuel Abiola Robinson), a Nigerian national who is trying his darndest to overcome casual racism, transcend his stereotypical African image as a drug peddler named Kevin, and find a real job with his MBA degree. Ironically, his skin tone is an obstacle in a culture that’s so busy playing victim to the first world and massaging its own brown-person complex that it remains oblivious to the third-world gaze it inflicts upon others. It’s a vicious cycle, but Michael’s 6-year relationship with the city comes to a head when he befriends a coke-addicted godwoman (Geetika Vidya Ohylan).

The framework of Kankhajura is ripe with promise. It’s a revenge drama going through an identity crisis — it doesn’t behave like one for the most part, and every time the theme emerges, it feels a bit surprising. Based on an Israeli series called Magpie, Kankhajura (“centipede”) revolves around the sticky ‘rehabilitation’ of Ashu (Roshan Mathew), a young man released from prison after 14 years. There’s something shapeless about him. He looks innocent in a deranged way, shows signs of neurological damage, has a trauma-infused stutter, and freelances as a police mole. Most of all, Ashu remains needy for the validation of his older brother Max (Mohit Raina), a real-estate mogul who aids his reintegration into society without fully embracing his return.

The crime scene: an upscale Bandra apartment. The crime: famous surgeon Raj Nagpal (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) is found holding the dead body of his girlfriend, Roshni Saluja (Asha Negi). The social angle: the person who finds Raj in this position is none other than his separated wife, Anju (Surveen Chawla), who lives next door. The dysfunctional-family quirk: Roshni was the nurse and caregiver of Raj and Anju’s neurodivergent 13-year-old daughter (Khushi Bhardwaj). The lawyer(s): working-class hero Madhav Mishra (Pankaj Tripathi) defends prime suspect Raj against old foe and public prosecutor Lekha Agastya (Shweta Basu Prasad). Other characters who may or may not matter: a shaken housemaid, two police investigators (also a divorced couple), Roshni’s ex-boyfriend, Raj’s bitchy friends, Anju’s jaded face, and the public spat that Raj and Roshni had at the daughter’s birthday party the night before.