Haiwaan

Haiwaan vs Insaan, monster vs human, that age-old conflict in the movies, gets a refresh in Haiwaan, with Priyadarshan re-upping his own 2016 Malayalam hit Oppam. Here Saif Ali Khan plays the sightless Shyam, up against Akshay Kumar’s murderous Parshuram, in a film which stays largely faithful to the original. In Priyan’s world protagonists and antagonists are always arrayed in black and white, with lashes of heavy-handed humour thrown in. The mix works in some of his movies, mostly his loud comedies in which the cast is tasked with delivering dialogues when not hanging off cliffs: Haiwaan is the usual mix of genres in Priyadarshan’s films, in which tonal switches abound, the first half setting up the premise of an innocent man being imprisoned for a crime he didn’t do, and the second turning into an unintentional comic police procedural.

Priyadarshan has remade his own Malayalam film Oppam, which released in 2016, as the Hindi film Haiwaan. The original, starring Mohanlal, had a simple but effective premise: a visually impaired building manager gets involved in protecting the young daughter of a resident who is murdered as part of a revenge plot. Somehow, that story worked beautifully in 2016. In Haiwaan, the same premise struggles to hold together. The biggest problem is that the world created by Priyadarshan simply doesn’t feel believable.

Last week Gandhari, this week Haiwaan, Bollywood needs to exploit a new handicap to traumatise moviegoers. Priyadarshan’s remake of his Mohanlal starrer Oppam revolves around a blind man. One fourth of Haiwaan is spent drilling this over and over again. Those who can see are hardly better off.Watching Haiwaan is such a tormenting exercise, I wonder whether everyone associated with this monstrosity made a secret pact to remain blindfolded at the time of script reading. Having skipped the Malayalam original, nothing could have prepared me for the stupidity in store. For a change, the tendency among Hindi remakes to become glossed-up avatars of their source material, swapping substance for style, is the least of its crimes.

If there were a world in which simply “Why?” could pass off as a professional film review, I’d happily live in it. But here I am instead, wondering how to do my job, after 164 minutes of precisely the kind of movie that makes Bollywood everyone’s favourite punching bag. Priyadarshan’s Haiwaan, a remake of Priyadarshan’s Oppam, is inane in so many ways that one is spoiled for choice. I had vowed to be kinder and calmer to bad thrillers; it’s easy to be entertaining when the only motive is to surprise the audience. But this kindness and calmness disappeared two scenes in, when the blind protagonist sings a happy-go-lucky song and dances optimistically on a ferry to Mumbai like a 1980s hero striving in the wrong decade; this is moments after he is introduced as a part-time wrestler, guitarist and all-round truster who has just fixed his sister’s marriage. It’s hard not to be defeated by the delusionally dated tone before the premise even begins.

After the death of a retired judge (Boman Irani), his loyal aide, visually impaired maintenance worker Shyam Rane (Saif Ali Khan), senses foul play. Without actually seeing him, he detects the presence of a killer, Parshuram (Akshay Kumar), in the room. Can Shyam track down the murderer, who is himself on the prowl? Driven by rage and revenge, Parshuram stalks Shyam like a shadow as he attempts to get to the judge’s daughter. He has scores to settle with her father and will stop at nothing. Can Shyam save her from the clutches of this haiwaan? A Hindi remake of Priyadarshan’s own Malayalam thriller Oppam (2016), the film makes you wonder why the director felt the need to revisit the story, especially when the material feels this dramatically thin. Devoid of a compelling mystery or sustained tension, the narrative quickly turns flat and monotonous. The writing fails to create intriguing characters or situations that keep you invested, let alone on the edge of your seat.