 "Best and Worst Hindi Films 2022: Lows that left the bottom of the barrel behind plus a handful of highs")
In December 2020 and 2021, it was tough to compile a list of 10 Best Hindi Films of those years because so few had been released. India was in the grip of the COVID19 pandemic at the time. In the past 12 months though, the Mumbai-based industry had no such excuse.
2022 will forever be known as the year in which the Hindi film industry’s imagination sank to an all-time low, Hindi remakes of southern Indian hits became the go-to formula, and even most of those were done so ordinarily as to be pale shadows of the originals. And so, instead of my annual Top 10, I decided to put together a list of 2022’s best and worst Hindi cinema from among the films I watched that were released in theatres and on streaming platforms.
Inshallah, the Hindi film industry will pick itself up in 2023 and do better. For now, here’s looking back at 2022:
BEST OF 2022
Best Film: Titu Ambani
Director: Rohit Raj Goyal
Primary cast: Deepika Singh, Tushar Pandey, Sapna Sand, Raghubir Yadav, Samta Sagar, Virendra Saxena
TV actor Deepika Singh made a smashing film debut with Titu Ambani, the story of a young couple – Mousumi and Titu (Tushar Pandey) – treading a thorny path around patriarchy in small-town north India. The title references Titu’s lofty professional ambitions and unwillingness to start small. When his career goals intersect with their relationship and traditionalism, matters go downhill for two reasons: Mousumi is far more practical and mature than he is, plus she refuses to be a pushover.
Deepika and Tushar hit it out of the park in their respective roles, with the backing of one of the year’s most brilliant supporting casts.
Rarely has a man-woman equation been explored in Hindi cinema with such a fine balance between what is and what ought to be. Titu Ambani critiques conventions without turning Mousumi into an unrealistic, unconvincing heroic idol. Too many such films in the past have departed from their purportedly progressive goals by marginalising the woman midway through the narrative or unwittingly revealing their own conservative true colours at some point. Titu Ambani does not – despite drawing its name from the male lead – thus placing writer-director Rohit Raj Goyal in the company of a tiny group of men filmmakers who have created women characters with a depth of understanding that rises above a mere desire to appear politically correct.
Games
View AllTitu Ambani is a thoughtful, believable, sweet and funny film that did not get the attention it deserved when it was released in theatres this summer.
Note: The film was released in theatres. It is not yet streaming online.
2: Badhaai Do
Director: Harshavardhan Kulkarni
Primary cast: Bhumi Pednekar, Rajkummar Rao
A few years back, I interviewed the late scholar Saleem Kidwai for an article on the portrayal of the LGBT+ community in Hindi cinema down the decades. When I asked him if he thought misrepresentation and stereotyping are better than erasure, he said: “Negative characters at least prompt a discussion. Caricatures are not good, but if we wait for that perfect gay character to emerge, we’ll be waiting a long time. There’s a whole journey where lots of rubbish will be produced before a full-fledged gay character grows.” I wish Saleem saab was around to see Harshavardhan Kulkarni’s Badhaai Do, the point at which the Hindi film industry has finally – finally! – arrived after years of “lots of rubbish” interspersed with occasional splashes of sensitivity.
Written by Akshat Ghildial, Suman Adhikary and Harshavardhan himself, Badhaai Do is the story of a lavender couple who are as different in their view of their own sexual orientation as white chalk is from blue cheese. The chemistry that Bhumi Pednekar and Rajkummar Rao conjure up with their respective romantic partners in the film is as much a factor of impeccable writing as their impeccable performances.
Like Titu Ambani, Badhaai Do has a point to make but it does so – just like that film – with a feather light touch and a sense of humour that never once makes light of the homophobia in the social milieu in which it is set. Badhaai Do is a case study for students of cinema on the difference between laughing at members of a marginalised community and laughing with.
Streaming on: Netflix
3: **_Jalsa_**
Director: Suresh Triveni
Primary cast: Vidya Balan, Shefali Shah, Rohini Hattangady, Surya Kasibhatla
Excerpt from my review:
“Jalsa is not about social disparities and human relationships alone… It is thematically an unslottable film that is not specifically about anything yet is about everything, ranging from class differences to happenstance and the call of the human conscience – in short, it is about life itself… Half the battle for Jalsa was won when Vidya Balan and Shefali Shah were roped in to share screen space. Balan has the ability to transport a viewer into the universe of her emotions, but rarely has she done so as thoroughly as in Jalsa, playing off Shah’s completely unself-conscious rendition of the distraught, progressively bitter Ruksana.”
Read the full review here:
Vidya Balan and Shefali Shah light up a story of class, happenstance and the human conscienceStreaming on: Amazon Prime Video
4: Qala
Director: Anvitaa Dutt
Primary cast: Tripti Dimri, Swastika Mukherjee, Babil Khan
Mental and emotional fragility have seldom been portrayed as exquisitely in cinema as they are in Qala. Writer-director Anvitaa Dutt’s period drama is about a daughter whose mother blames her for the death of her baby brother and whose worst nightmare comes to life in her adulthood in the form of a fellow singer epitomising everything that the mother and she, young Qala Manjushree, imagined a son in the family would be. The goings-on on screen are imbued with other-worldly atmospherics and an eeriness that reflects the ghosts of Qala’s present and past.
In addition to top-notch production design (Meenal Agarwal) and cinematography (Siddharth Diwan), Qala features one of the best soundtracks to come from the Hindi film industry in years (Amit Trivedi).
Qala marks the acting debut of Babil Khan, the late Irrfan Khan’s son. While Babil is no doubt a talent to watch out for, the film belongs to the formidable Tripti Dimri and Swastika Mukherjee who play off each other with incredible restraint. Tripti’s rendition of the hurt and insecurity caused by rejection could melt a heart of stone.
Streaming on: Netflix
Director: Shakun Batra
Primary cast: Deepika Padukone, Siddhanth Chaturvedi, Ananya Pandey, Dhairya Karwa
Excerpt from my review:
“Gehraiyaan is not constructed like a conventional thriller, but the events in the storyline press forward with an urgency that makes it impossible to look away. The writers (Devitre Dhillon, Batra, Sumit Roy and Yash Sahai) and editor Nitesh Bhatia have imbued their plot with a tempo and tenor that makes it the cinematic equivalent of an unputdownable book.”
Read the full review here:
Gehraiyaan movie review: Deepika Padukone is all kinds of breathtaking in a page-turner of a filmStreaming on: Amazon Prime Video
6: Matto Ki Saikil
Director: M. Gani
Primary cast: Prakash Jha, Anita Chaudhary, Aarohi Sharma, Idika Roy
While Hindi cinema by and large insists on keeping caste at arm’s length, M. Gani places it at the front and centre of the action in the poignant and consistently gripping rural drama, Matto Ki Saikil. The titular protagonist is a daily-wage labourer who works on construction sites and does other odd jobs. The back-breaking burdens he bears are made worse by the terrible condition of the cycle that is his only means of transport.
Matto Ki Saikil is in fine form in its examination of the male lead’s inner and outer journey, village politics and his daughter’s fledgling ties with a local boy. It slips up in its portrayal of Matto’s marriage though, occasionally straying towards suggesting that the man in an impoverished household bears a greater burden than his spouse.
The cast looks and feels like real people rather than performers, with Prakash Jha – who viewers know better as a director – leading the charge with a conviction that begs the question why we don’t see him acting more often.
Matto Ki Saikil rolls out at a sedate pace that, without any formulaic attempts at being entertaining, still manages to be engaging right till its very end.
Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video
WORST OF 2022
Worst Film: **_Liger_**
Director: Puri Jagannadh
Primary cast: Vijay Deverakonda, Ananya Panday, Ramya Krishnan
Excerpt from my review:
“It’s hard to decide what is worse: Liger’s cruel “haklana” (stammer) quips or its hate for women… Liger overflows with the signature tackiness, immaturity and misogyny associated with Puri Jagannadh; misogyny that defines Vijay Deverakonda too since he has proudly worn it on his sleeve after striking gold with Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Arjun Reddy (2017 / Telugu).”
Read the full review here:
Juvenile, primitive, woman-hating, quality-averse dude festStreaming on: Disney+Hotstar
Director: Ram Ramesh Sharma
Primary cast: Sanjay Mishra, Amol Parashar, Vijay Raaz, Barkha Singh
Excerpt from my review:
“There’s bad, and there is embarrassingly bad. 36 Farmhouse, co-produced by Zee Studios and (Subhash) Ghai’s Mukta Arts, falls into the second category. Directed by Ram Ramesh Sharma, with story, lyrics and music credited to Ghai, this film is meant to be a thriller. Actor Sanjay Mishra’s exaggerated mannerisms from his very first scene indicate that it is also meant to be a comedy. It fails to deliver in both genres.”
Read the full review here:
Zero-energy, zero-thought thriller produced by the director who once made KarzStreaming on: Zee5
Director: Razneesh ‘Razy’ Ghai
Primary cast: Kangana Ranaut, Arjun Rampal, Divya Dutta
Excerpt from my review:
“Dhaakad is not so much a film as it is a series of embarrassments lasting over two hours, perhaps the most cringe-worthy of all being the song sung by Badshah in the finale with lyrics likening the leading lady to a Quentin Tarantino film. ‘Tarantino ki dasvi filam hai…’ The line unwittingly puts a seal on a mortifying truth: that Dhaakad (meaning: Formidable) is shamelessly derivative. It is not Tarantino though, but the Lara Croft blockbuster franchise starring Angelina Jolie that the team of this Hindi film primarily seems to be mining, right down to the heroine’s look, which includes figure-hugging black outfits of varying lengths and long plaited hair in large parts of the narrative.”
Read the full review here:
Kangana Ranaut tries a Lara Croft in a dull, embarrassingly derivative, grossly violent sagaStreaming on: Zee5
Director: Mohit Suri
Primary cast: John Abraham, Arjun Kapoor, Disha Patani, Tara Sutaria
Excerpt from my review:
“As the narrative trundles along, Ek Villain Returns’ killer/s find/s increasingly more inventive and ghastly ways to finish off women, including running their bodies through a mechanised meat cleaver, elsewhere snuffing out a woman in a bear hug with bare hands. The camera even gives us a close-up of a chopped-up female body being carried in a bucket through a meat storage facility.”
Read the full review here:
A gory, boring chronicle of the persecution complex pervading the manosphereStreaming on: Netflix
Director: Ribhu Dasgupta
Primary cast: Parineeti Chopra, Harrdy Sandhu, Sharad Kelkar
Excerpt from my review:
“Twice in the final half hour I thought the film was over, but as I readied to leave, another yawn-worthy stretch rolled out. As if anxious to drive a nail deep into the coffin of Hindi cinema and bury it, in the absolute end, the heroine is made to spout some awfully hackneyed lines about how Durga is the form that every woman takes to right wrongs blah blah blah and that every time the Tiranga is under threat, she will take that form again. Aiyyo! Spare us!”
Read the full review here:
Ek Thi Tiger and she is wasted in a thrill-less spy ‘thriller’Streaming on: Netflix
6: Khuda Haafiz: Chapter II – Agni Pariksha
Director: Faruk Kabir
Primary cast: Vidyut Jammwal, Shivaleeka Oberoi, Sheeba Chadha
Excerpt from my review:
“Considering how flat _Khuda Haafiz Part 1_ was, it is amazing that a Chapter 2 has been made at all. This one’s ending, centred on Sameer emerging as the new “baahubali” of Lucknow and Malihabad (as one character describes him), implies that there will be a Chapter 3, maybe even 4 and 5. Stranger things have happened in this cosmos.”
Read the full review here:
Rape is just an excuse here for a gory Vidyut Jammwal festStreaming on: Zee5
7: _Ram Setu_
Director: Abhishek Sharma
Primary cast: Akshay Kumar, Jacqueline Fernandez, Nushrratt Bharuccha, Satya Dev
Excerpt from my review:
“Ram Setu is significant only because of the dangers posed by painstakingly disguised propagandist cinema, especially in the current socio-political climate. If not for that, this is just another boring Akshay Kumar film of the many that have been churned out by Bollywood in recent years. Raksha Bandhan, Cuttputlli, now this. Yawn!”
Read the full review here:
A Hindutva project pretending to be scientific, with aspirations to being a BaahubaliStreaming on: Amazon Prime Video
RELATED LINK: Anna M.M. Vetticad’s list of Best Malayalam Films of 2022:
A year so good that keeping this list down to 10 was impossibleAnna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial
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