Does Vikrant Rona have the potential to be the next big one from the south? Yes

After sitting wide-eyed and open-mouthed for close to three hours to Sudeep’s new swag-saturated supernatural thriller, I realized what the Southern filmmakers have that Bollywood doesn’t. Delectation. That’s the quality Sukumar’s _Pushpa_ , Rajamouli’s _RRR_ and Prashanth Neel’s _KGF_ possessed in abundance. You can see the sambhar-slurping finger-licking relish in every frame of the Kannada film (dubbed in Hindi) _Vikrant Rona_ . The actors, their performances, the plot and its execution, all are done with gravity-defying gusto. Cinematographer William David who has collaborated with director Anup Bhandari for his earlier film Rangitarana, splashes every frame with the colours of festivity. Even when crime happens, it is gorgeously gruesome, with the frame ignited by a turbulent energy. Watching Vikrant Rona is like being on a rollercoaster ride. While you are on it, it’s just the heart-pumping exhilaration that matters: not what comes before or after. Just the experience of the moment. By no stretch of the imagination is Vikrant Rona a great film. Or even a good film. But it is one helluva enjoyable joyride, capricious , chaotic and kookie. Swathed in the spirit of the supernatural. Pausing for cheap comic relief before swinging back into the rites of darkness. The performances and more importantly the mise en scene scream for our attention. It’s an offer we cannot resist. Writer-director Anup Bhandari knows the grammar of kitsch better than a majority of contemporary Indian filmmakers who get apologetic about their chosen visual vernacular after a point . Not Bhandari. He is very sure of his language of looming populism. Vikrant Rona opens with a woman and her little daughter travelling through a dark forest in a vintage car from the 1970s. This is the narrative that favours the past without overwhelming us with nostalgia. What happens next is straight from the Ramsay house of horrors. But for one fundamental difference: the coarseness of the language is forever repudiated by technical finesse. Vikrant Rona possesses a strikingly sensuous look. The over-saturated colours, the frenetic movement of characters in a melodramatic flow and the prevalent mood of auto-exhilaration are symptoms of a cinema that chooses to be glib-tongued. It works for the film. There is a thundering song sequence (not the one featuring Jacqueline Fernandez which, despite the killer choreographic moves, is irrelevant) but the one where the children of the village go wild with Sudeep and the romantic pair Nirup Bhandari and Neetha Ashok. Midway through the kinetic performance, Sudeep, playing a cross between a cop and a superhero , a protective father and a ruthless professional, stops short to mumble to the young hero, “You better take over the song or you will never get the girl.” This is the nirvanic state that the Kannada star has reached in his career. He now wants to explore characters beyond the tired template. In (and as) Vikrant Rona, Sudeep is a rebel and renegade, an outsider on the prowl in a village that represents the world of disambiguous dreams. Vikrant Rona is a mainstream blues-chaser of the kind that Bollywood has stopped making almost entirely in the pursuit of an entertainment that is phonily refined. The coarse language of Vikrant Rona is actually the sound of the folk narrative from the time of street performances. This is a back-to-basics drama, theatrical and bombastic and not apologetic about it. Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.