Vash Level 2

A pack of teenage schoolgirls wreak havoc across a city. They overpower everyone and everything in sight, seemingly possessed by superhuman strength and violent desire. The attack is visceral and unstructured, like the beginning of a dance rehearsal gone wrong. Their school uniforms become a symbol of danger. The police are clueless; the parents are terrified. The setting is notoriously sexist, so the sight of them spreading chaos is oddly empowering. In most movies, it would be. But Vash Level 2 is not most movies. The sequel to Vash (2023), Krishnadev Yagnik’s national award-winning supernatural thriller that was remade as Shaitaan (2024) in Hindi, our simplistic perception of female empowerment is thrown out of the window (or, well, off a terrace). Even their “rebellion” is defined by subservience; their agency is shaped by the crippling lack of one. For they are actually controlled by a sinister male stranger (Hiten Kumar) who laced their lunch with black-magic dust. The rampage is happening against the girls’ wishes; their bodies are weaponised but their minds are scared. Most of them attack hawkers, motorists and street-dwellers and bash their heads in, regardless of gender or status. The smash-the-patriarchy allegory unfolds like a cruel joke. The brainwashing and societal-conditioning metaphors unfold like punchlines.