Sanjay Mishra and Neena Gupta's Vadh is a well-intended flipped morality tale

Sanjay Mishra who plays an economically vulnerable school teacher in Indore, tells a cop in Vadh, “Once I had slapped a student. I couldn’t sleep for days. Now I’ve put a knife through a man’s throat, and I feel no remorse.” This could be Vijay Salgaonkar in _Drishyam_ if he ever decided to confess to the murder that he committed to protect his family. Some crimes say these closeted vigilante films deserve a personal fast court. The bestial man the innocent upright school teacher kills in the fascinating if at times trite and over-written _Vadh_ . is a debt collector, who crosses all limits. Sanjay Mishra as Shambhunath the schoolteacher and Saurabh Sachdeva as Pandey play off well against each other, the former flawlessly timid and intimidated, the latter uncouth and intimidating. The manner in which co-writers-directors Jaswal Singh Sandhu and Rajeev Barnwal stage the murder in the elongated living room of Shambhunath’s home, is a trifle disturbing. It’s as if Shambhunath has been doing this all his life. Sapun Narula’s camera watches the crime with a quietly observant eye. The technicians don’t mean to impress. The upturned morality apart, there is plenty to appreciate, even admire in Vadh. The central performances are exceptionally well-tuned. Sanjay Mishra brings out the helplessness and suppressed rage of a common senior citizen fed up of being bullied. Neena Gupta is equally strong as the silently supportive wife. Mishra and Gupta play against one another like Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi in Gautam Ghose’s Paar, except that the pigs being herded across the river are in human form. The battle now goes far beyond caste injustice. If you are weak you will be tormented. Brahminical immunity is a thing of the past.

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It is a frighteningly real message, and it is timely. That Vadh is set in a non-metropolitan city like Indore makes it all the more palpable. In cities like Patna and Indore property usurpation is prevalent, especially if the victims are old vulnerable citizens. The real villain of the piece is the old couple’s son, who like many such ungrateful sons, has migrated abroad leaving his hapless father behind to pay off the monstrous migratory debt. My favourite sequence in Vadh is when Shambhunath tells the cybercafé owner that he and his wife will never return to make that weekly Skype call to his son. The rejection of those who reject us is the most life-affirming decision one can make. Vadh makes the right life-affirming moves but gets bogged down by trying to keep the plot well-balanced. The blind spots in the storytelling (the whole ‘Naina’ track about the little girl whom Shambhunath oversees as the hope of tomorrow is too illustrative to be moving) are effectively covered by the principal performances. Besides Sanjay Mishra and Neena Gupta, Manav Vij does well as a morally conflicted cop. There are interesting small-town references, like the weekly family magazine Manohar Kahaniyan which is avidly read in many small towns. Vadh is the wake-up call for the mofussil citizens slumbering for too long on sunny rooftops reading pulp stories. Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.