Rahul Desai

By now, it’s clear that the Mardaani franchise — which revolves around supercop SSP Shivani Shivaji Rao (Rani Mukerji) and her patriarchy-smashing badassery — is known for its villains. Not unlike the other baddie-steals-the-show YRF action franchise, Dhoom. Unlike the Dhoom movies, though, the Mardaani trademark is that it handpicks relatively anonymous (male) talent and propels them into the limelight. Mardaani (2014) thrived on its slick and urban Wall Street-capitalist-coded mastermind; Tahir Raj Bhasin made quite the splash. Mardaani 2 (2019) pivoted to the opposite end of the spectrum; it relied on a light-eyed hinterland psychopath, gamely played by Vishal Jethwa. Given that these characters are largely created and written by men, it’s perhaps by design that they outshine the star of these movies.

I like how Daldal opens. A woman is seated with her older friend at a local bakery. She does not look pleased; they’re discussing a love poem written by a boy across from them. Her friend teases her. They’re used to his lecherous gaze. Suddenly the two women get a call and leave. We soon learn that they were actually ACP Rita Ferrera (Bhumi Pednekar) and sub-inspector Indu Mhatre (the ever-watchable Geeta Agrawal Sharma) waiting to raid a brothel in Mumbai’s red-light area. The boy was actually a student, because Rita had infiltrated the area as an undercover teacher. It’s one thing for Rita to pretend to be someone else, it’s another for the series itself to pretend that she’s someone else. After the raid, we see her come home to a fiancè cooking dinner. He brings her some wine. We expect her to soften. Within seconds, we learn that this is, in fact, a couple on the verge of separation; one of them is moving out. This is a recurring trick — it shows us the expectation panel before hitting us with reality. It’s like even the camera is not in on the illusion: it bakes the average Indian viewer’s conditioning and gaze into the film-making. This extends to the end of the episode. The dual identity of a killer is revealed; the victims, too, seem to be older males who hide behind the veil of virtue.

In Tumbbad director Rahi Anil Barve’s second film, stories are told in a cinema hall. Quite literally. A few characters reminisce, rage, narrate, perform and lie in a decrepit Mumbai movie theater named Mayasabha; they may be projecting, but the blank screen is witness to the telling and untelling of their stories. The place looks halfway abandoned between suffocating reality and misty mythology: like a penniless single-screen auditorium that gave up on its own allegorical significance (as Mahabharata’s Hall of Illusions). It is also “home” to a once-famous and now-unhinged film producer, Parmeshwar Kumar (Jaaved Jaaferi). He lives in the past but scoffs at history.

When Chandrayaan-3 nailed the first-ever soft landing on the South Pole of the moon in 2023, all I could think of was the mad scramble of studios to secure the rights to ISRO’s remarkable feat. I could almost sense it happening in real time. It didn’t take long for the child-coded euphoria to make way for an adult-coded wariness — who’s going to pitch first? Who’s going to overcook the perfectly good story? Who’s going to make the unglamorous heroes speak to each other like human ChatGPT apps? It felt inevitable, given the tailor-made ingredients: science, space, patriotism, spaced-out patriotism, a budget less than Nolan’s Interstellar, New India, first-world villains, a moon that doesn’t resemble Swiss cheese. TVF wasn’t on my Creator bingo card, but their slate has often used popular appeal to conceal themes of social conservatism and compliance over the years. Ironically, the current ‘2016 viral trend’ would flash back to TVF as the first movers and harbingers of Indian web storytelling. But space is not their jam; the future is not their cup of (mainstream) tea.

The “Supreme” in Marty Supreme has dual connotations. The obvious one is that here’s an underdog hero who will stop at nothing to achieve sporting supremacy. Marty Mauser will be an anti-hero, a hustler, a fraud, a narcissist and whoever it takes to summon his destiny of being world champion. Usually, such protagonists have to overcome the system with talent and grit. Here, the talent and grit are almost incidental. It is assumed he has those, so he’d rather game the system in the language of those who run it. As a Jewish shoe salesman in 1950s New York in a post-Holocaust world, he is accustomed to selling his identity more than proving it. America and table tennis are merely his mediums to be seen; he is neither patriotic nor a purist. If he’s an allegory for the entitlement of US capitalism and the illusion of the American Dream — where he upends multiple lives and puts everyone at risk to get what he wants — so be it.

I have two core memories from the time of J.P. Dutta’s Border (1997), the era-altering Bollywood blockbuster that made national pride an innocent household emotion two years before the Kargil War. One: a talented classmate named Rohan won the singing competition the next three years in a row by nailing the anthem-coded hit “Sandese Aate Hai”. We often ended up crooning along like rogue choir vocalists. But his pre-teen voice never faltered, towering over the auditorium without needing to understand the lyrics. They were just musical words to us. The second memory is more haunting. The final montage of the film — where newly widowed women, penniless old parents and glum relatives wait in vain — left a lasting impression on me. Most of us had enjoyed the action sequences, bloodshed, martyr-like deaths and slow-mo courage up until that moment. To be hit with the sobering price of war felt like an out-of-syllabus chapter; the sadness had no sides. I did not expect a patriotic and violent war epic to close on a slightly reflective note.

Nia Dacosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple directly takes off from where Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later (2025) left off. The setting is quarantined Britain, 28 full years after the Rage Virus — a mutated strain that transformed its victims into hyperaggressive zombie-like creatures — tore through the continent in 28 Days Later (2002). Few humans have survived. Young Spike (Alfie Williams) leaves the sheltered isle after the death of his cancer-riddled mother (Jodie Comer) to “come of age” on his own terms in the zombie-infested mainland. This film opens with him getting roped into the weird ‘gang’ that rescued him at the end of the last film — except they turn out to be a toxic Satanic cult run by a psychopath named Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Sinners’ Jack O’Connell). Spike is too scared to escape the Jimmys, a group that spends their days skinning and killing survivors as a sacrifice to the devil. Parallely, a lonely Dr Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who urged Spike to find his own way, forges an unlikely bond with Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), the Alpha leader who terrorised them not too long ago. It’s apparent that, at some point, the paths of the iodine-smothered orange-skinned doctor and a Jimmy’d Spike will cross. What’s not apparent is how a post-apocalyptic zombie thriller can be unexpectedly funny and profound at once: not spoofy-Shaun of the Dead funny, more like Tarantino-Spike-Lee-revisionism funny.

A Neeraj Pandey-created film or series comes with a specific aesthetic: neither television plus nor streaming pulp. Or perhaps both at once. To be fair, this treatment has remained consistent over the years. You know what to expect from the filmmaking: physical momentum is used to manufacture the illusion of narrative intellect. There are those long tracking shots of characters walking importantly from one space to another and one mood to another. The camera and background score move faster than the plot; they work overtime to defeat inertia and convey a sense of coolth and cleverness. Even if people are merely looking at one another, the lens rotates around their bodies in circles and sometimes follows their gaze as if there’s a reveal of Big Foot at the end of every shot. There’s the fake-flashback formula; an incomplete scene or conversation plays out at first only for the story to later show the full scene/conversation that conveniently omitted the twist. And there’s the ‘cultural’ colour-grading: the Middle East is yellow-sepia, Europe is blue, India is yellow-blue, Africa is green, the sky changes tones like an errant disco ball rather than AQI markers.