Shubhra Gupta

When this sixth season of Slow Horses showed up amongst much excitement, there was this automatic question in our heads: would the change in writers — series creator and lead writer Will Smith handed over the reins to Gaby Chiappe — impact the show, which nestles comfortably in my list of best spy thrillers currently streaming. The answer is a resounding no. I have to confess I was a little sceptical when this new season began, but the way it has forged ahead, turning a show that spent a lot of time brooding in dank rooms, sending its gaggle of gabby, dank spies, on a breathless chase involving our favourite slow horses and a Russian hit-couple, I’ve barely had time to breathe.

Illegal sand-mining continues to be the flavour of the season. Anil Kapoor’s ex-Armyman went up against the ruthless mafia controlling operations in the sepia-tinted hinterlands in Subedaar earlier this year. Now come Parineeti Chopra and Deven Bhojani as the intrepid reporter-camera duo from a TRP-hungry TV network (are there any other kinds?) who confront the bad guys. The nearly two-hour long duration is spent in watching Sandhya Yadav (Parineeti Chopra) and Vinod Sharma (Deven Bhojani) tracking the act itself on the banks of a river, being threatened both outside and inside the workplace, running the gamut of supportive types and unhelpful seniors, going sleuthing in tall unfinished buildings, and other dangerous places.

Pooja (Mrunal Thakur) is in the dock. Her jilted boyfriend Aniket (Vikram Singh Chauhan) is dead, and the blame has been placed squarely upon her slender shoulders. Her lawyer Sana (Huma Qureshi) is not well-versed in criminal law, but she’s a friend, something the investigating officer Jatin (Vijay Raaz) is clearly not. He’s convinced that Pooja is responsible, and vows to make her pay. Pooja is the kind of modern, independent young woman whom the manosphere — desi or elsewhere — hates. She has a busy dating life, and doesn’t think that it’s her job to rescue the men she’s with. It’s even-stevens, and if the men have a problem, there’s the door. Which is pretty much how it should be, but of course it’s not, whether it’s in the movies or real life.

Does the much-awaited concluding part of Drishyam live up to its expectations? Yes, it absolutely does. A very quick recap, before we jump into the details. In 2013, came the original, headlined by Mohanlal as the not-very-educated cable-TV operator who gets embroiled in a dark cover-up involving his family. Loosely borrowing from the chief plot twists of the globally popular Japanese thriller The Devotion of Suspect X by Kiego Higashino, the Malayalam-language film gained an instant cult following and was remade in a bunch of languages, including Hindi, in which Ajay Devgn jumped into the part and ran with it, in 2015.

One of the reasons that Dupahiya worked was its cheerful focus on the importance of the two-wheeler—its ‘whereof’ and ‘whyfor’. A potential groom demands a dupahiya to marry an excited girl who has fallen, not for his brash charms, but for the promise of getting away from here to there, a fictional Dhadakpur to a real-life Mumbai. It became the dhuri (fulcrum) around which the series revolves, telling the story of a gaon, its people and its politics in a spry and enjoyable way. The second season suffers from a plot which doesn’t thicken till way past the halfway mark, even though it feels timely: the leaking of exam papers is a fraught issue, whose fire has caused unimaginable turmoil.

The rampage of dhongi babas, spellbound bhakts and shell-shocked victims continues apace. The fresh spate began in 2020 with Bobby Deol spreading his beatific smile and vile ways through the multi-season ‘Ashram’ . In 2023, we saw Manoj Bajpayee fighting a lone battle against a powerful self-styled godman, based on the real-life Asaram, in ‘Sirf Ek Banda Kaafi Hai’. That was followed by Jaideep Ahlawat jumping into the role of the rapacious ‘Maharaj’ in a film of the same name in 2024. Now comes ‘Hunkkaar’, in which the excellent Raghubir Yadav plays Baapji, the all-seeing seer who preys upon young girls. While the casting seems, at first glance, to be inspired – I mean, the always likeable Yadav turning into a monster, can you imagine – not being able to overcome the utter familiarity of the subject never allows Hunkkaar to become its own beast.

Some films are bad. Some are terrible. And some are pure torture. The Vvaan falls neatly into that third category, in which I struggled to find a single redeeming feature, and failed spectacularly. When we first come upon a Mumbai-based engineer (Sidharth Malhotra) and his wife (Tamannaah Bhatia), childless but certainly not loveless, they are a) singing songs in a large sea-side bungalow, b) fetching up at a quack who hands out potency powders and c) participating in a hideous racist-colourist joke. The Vvaan never recovers from this early blow. Nor did I, as the film kept drawing me deeper into an off-colour, off-putting mix of so-called fantasy and folklore, of the kind that involves dark forests and their resident guardian devis, and evil spirits which devour those who dare walk into their domain after dark.

Have we finally reached a level of comfort around legit adult themes like love and lust? Going by the thrust on female desire, and the importance of physical intimacy in keeping a relationship alive in Lust Stories 3, it would appear to be so. Hallelujah. The first edition, out in 2018, felt radical in that it could even use the word in its title, given the insistent prudery surrounding all things sexual in our films. And there was enough in those initial four shorts — hard to forget The Curious Case Of Kiara Advani and the Silent Vibrator — to keep us invested, and interested in what would come next. Except part 2, in 2023, was mostly a dud, with the exception of the episode in which Konkona Sensharma as director and actor teamed up with the excellent Amruta Subash for a hot intersection between class and desire.