Shubhra Gupta

To judge by appearance is a bad thing. This single line premise is stretched out over two and a half hours, leading to a film where you are left counting the moments where two people spark. The only nice thing about Do Deewane Seher Mein– please note, not Shehar–is that for a change a Hindi film doesn’t make you feel as if Shashank (Sidhant Chaturvedi) and Roshni (Mrunal Thakur) could be brother and sister. There is attraction, and they do act upon it, bringing their faces close enough for their lips to touch. Small mercies.

It was always going to be a tough act to follow. Kohrra, out in 2023, was an instant classic with its multi-pronged approach, gathering up the tangled skeins of personal and political, individual and societal, and love and longing, tethering everything to a small Punjab town. The plot was specific to its time and place but universal in the way it touched upon human frailties, while giving us full-bodied characters. Created and written by Gunjit Chopra, Diggi Sisodia, and Sudip Sharma, and directed by Randeep Jha, it was a triumph, and one of the best series I’ve watched in recent times. Sadly, I can’t say the same for this new season, which I’d been waiting for.

If you compare the two, the spiritual successor of the 2022 Vadh is better than the original, but as a stand-alone, Vadh 2 stops short on delivering on the promise it begins with. First off, though, props to the way the prison drama gives attention to all its characters, not just to the two main leads: Neena Gupta and Sanjay Mishra bear the same names, but, in an interesting turn, do not reprise their roles. In the first film, Shambhunath and Manju are middle-aged spouses, done in by the selfishness of an only son. In this one, the former works in Shivpuri prison, the latter is an inmate, serving life imprisonment for a double murder.

It’s 2029, Los Angeles. A detective finds himself in the hot seat, accused of murdering his wife. He has only 90 minutes to prove his innocence: the catch is, that it is an AI-powered justice system which is judge, jury, executioner, and if he can’t lay out sufficient evidence to clear himself, he will be executed. Blinking himself out of a stupor, Chris Raven (Chris Pratt) finds himself strapped to a chair, facing the beautiful Judge Maddox (Rebecca Fergusson). From all accounts in front of the judge, the detective was alone with his wife (Annabelle Wallis) for a length of time, during which she was stabbed with a sharp knife. Their daughter (Kylie Rogers) finds her mother lying in a pool of blood, and calls it in, and from then on, starts Chris’s ordeal.

Serial killers are flooding Mumbai. Just a couple of months back, Madhuri Dixit was hot on their heels in the web series ‘Mrs Deshpande’. Now it’s Bhumi Satish Pednekkar’s turn to do the same in ‘Daldal’. Both women have dark pasts, both confront their demons while navigating the quicksand of the present, in which good guys, bad guys and ill intentions wallow: by now, these tales, despite differences in plot and place, feel almost templated.

The chief difficulty even with popular franchises is the scourge of familiarity: how do you build in difference when the lead character and their line of work is the same? With Rani Mukerji returning for a third go round of Mardaani, her doughty cop Shivani Shivaji Roy arrayed against a new set of antagonists, we are left scrambling to discover new beats. This time around, there’s the formidable human trafficker Amma (Mallika Prasad) whose goons have been tasked with picking up pre-pubescent girls– now that’s certainly a difference– from disadvantaged backgrounds. A kidnapping-gone-wrong in a small UP town reverberates in Delhi: the girl’s father is a senior official, and the cops are given orders from on high to crack down.

I went into this film for a couple of reasons. One to see how inventive this silent film was, and the other because I can happily watch Vijay Sethupathi reading a directory. Here’s how it unfolds. Sethupathi plays a Poor Man Living With Usha Nadkarni’s Always Coughing Mother In A Chawl. He is in love with Aditi Rao Hydari’s Beautiful Damsel, who lives Ghar Ke Saamne. Arvind Swamy is a Rich Man Living In A Mansion.

J P Dutta’s 1997 Border was equal parts a war film and a Bollywood film, with strong doses of action and emotion. Its strength came from Dutta’s penchant for patriotic cinema, and of course the elusive thing that no filmmaker knows beforehand — the fulsome embrace of the audience. Despite its occasional spurt of anti-Pakistan rhetoric, and the constant conflation of Ma and Dharti Ma, the original Border remains one of the most complete war films that Hindi cinema has made, and its musical sandese still echo in our movie memories.