Suparna Sharma

Angry Young Men, a three-part series directed by Namrata Rao, is crafted like the many Bollywood blockbusters that its protagonists — Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar — wrote together. Starring their wives, children, colleagues, friends and fans, the series is devoted to not just telling the story of a very successful and almost epochal collaboration, but also to cast them as the best writers Indian cinema has ever had.

Since the arrival of OTT platforms and binge-watching, Indian series have shown a marked improvement in craft and skill at telling fictional stories. But when it comes to mounting real-life stories for OTT, most have floundered, sometimes because they follow Netflix’s formulaic template, and sometimes because of who is telling the story. Delhi Crime, for example, the riveting show on the Nirbhaya rape case, was made with the help of Delhi’s former commissioner of police, Neeraj Kumar, and it naturally made heroes out of cops when it should have interrogated them.

Vedaa is not a film about boxing, though its trailer seemed to suggest that. Director Nikkhil Advani’s film has a bit of boxing, of course, but its plot’s real drivers are caste and caste atrocities. However, Vedaa, starring John Abraham and Sharvari Wagh in the lead, is not a film about caste either. Vedaa is an action-thriller created to embellish and enhance the legend of John Abraham. In this enterprise, boxing is a tiny diversion and caste plays the same part that Islamic terrorism has often played in previous John Abraham-the-one-man-killer-machine films—It’s very bad and it must be annihilated. But since Vedaa is a Nikkhil Advani film, it’s politically sharp, gritty and mildly feminist. Written by Aseem Arora, Vedaa is set in Rajasthan, but its story really begins in Kashmir. Yep, that same-old scenic battleground Abraham keeps visiting, repeatedly, to save the nation from the Phiran-wearing, machine gun-carrying Islamic terrorists.

Director Jayprad Desai’s Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba begins like a pulpy, C-grade Hindi novel: with high drama. On a dark, rainy night in Agra, a woman is running for her life on a deserted road. Her wispy-thin saree sticking to her like clingfilm, she dashes into a police station, screaming. Her husband, she says, is going to kill her. She is Rani (Taapsee Pannu), currently married to Abhimanyu (Sunny Kaushal), a compounder. But at the police station, Rani encounters questions about her bloody past. Three years ago, in the 2021 film, Hasseen Dillruba, Rani was married to Rishu (Vikrant Massey) but had taken a lover, Neel. Things didn’t go as planned and she had struck Neel dead. And then she had helped cover up the murder with her husband’s severed arm.