First Take | When there’s nowhere to run to

It is interesting to see how different sections of people react to the crisis-on-hand in films. While most often a collective crisis brings out the compassionate side of the human personality, it can also unleash the beast in the individual, as we get to see in Jis Joy’s Malayalam whammy Innale Vare . Since his directorial debut in 2011, Jis Joy has done five films, out of which four starred Asif Ali. But I have to confess that what attracted me to Innale Vare was neither Joy nor Ali but writers Bobby-Sanjay who I am convinced are the best screenwriters in Indian cinema right now.

Fiercely original, and passionately devoted to telling stories that grip the audience from the word go, Bobby-Sanjay’s name in the credits signifies something special.

Bobby-Sanjay don’t disappoint with their writing in Innale Vare which is probably the best suspense thriller I’ve seen in recent years. The writing is so clenched one can’t afford a coffee break unless you want to live with the thought that you have missed something vital in the cat-and-mouse game between a fading superstar Adhi Shankar (Asif Ali) and a wily desperate couple Sharath and Shani ( Anthony Varghese , Nimisha Sajayan) who decide to make some seriously quick money out of Adhi by kidnapping him.

It is an outrageously implausible premise. The narrative logistics are buttressed by some imaginative direction and performers who are in this to execute a plan as outrageous on paper as it is on screen.

Some critics have slammed the film for being preposterously plot. But that’s missing the point completely. Innale Vare works so well for its complete surrender to the pulp tone. It is a brazenly fearlessly pulpy idea carried to extremes of implausibility, challenging the very notion of how far fiction can go in pursuit of a pulpy nirvana.

However, it is not all an outrageously enjoyable suspense ride. The plot makes a mordacious statement on how film stars lead their lives. The drinking, partying, extra-marital affair and the hedonistic lifestyle are all examined with a dash of irony. There is also the faithful secretary of the star who gets the brunt of his lord and master’s temper tantrums. We know him.

The kidnapping of a movie star is headline-making news. The way Shani and Sharath orchestrate an online masquerade to cover up the kidnapping is proof that the best films are being made in Kerala and that a Malayalam film need not be somber in tone or logical by the definition of naturalistic cinema to be considered great.

There is merit in the pulp. Innale Vare proves it. Some of Adhi Shankar’s attempts to escape his kidnappers are heart-in-the-mouth. Look out for the floor-burning combat between Asif Ali and Nimisha Sajayan where fists fly, furniture is hured…..Sajayan is a force of Nature when pushed to the corner. I am not that happy with Asif Ali’s performance. I missed Tomas Tovino’s star quality here.

Towards the bitter half of the plot, the goings-on gets hard to control. The morally elevated ending is incongruous with the rest of the film’s tone of unrepentant criminal conduct. A man (or woman) has got to do what he (or she) has got to, the film seems to suggest.

I wish the whole vendetta angle had been ripped out of the plot. Yes, the screen hero learns a few lessons on treating his friends, family and professional associates with respect. But is the celluloid star a better human being at the end? Or just acting?

A month before her marriage, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s first release was Mani Ratnam’s Guru, one of the finest films of her career. A week after her marriage , Nayanthara’s release 02 is arguably the worst film of her career. Sloppily written and slapdash in execution 02 initially made me perplexed, then annoyed finally angry for being what it is. A rancid piece of cinema with a message thrown in to make the end-product look more palatable to a more discerning audience. Not that even the most diehard Nayanthara fan would be able to sit through this…this….whatever it is.

In the Marathi zombie film Zombivili we get to see the best and the beast of human beings. It’s time we gave Marathi cinema its due. While Malayalam and Telugu cinema get their rightful place in the rites of critical assessment, Marathi cinema in spite of its long reputation of excellence isn’t given the place in Indian cinema it deserves.

Change that. Marathi cinema is shedding its plumes. It is getting crowd-savvy.

What happens when zombies attack Dombivli? It is mirth and mayhem time in Zombivili. So tighten your seatbelts, as Sudhir and Seema Joshi (Amey Wagh and Vaidehi Parashurami) and their stereotypically feisty maidservant, played by Trupti Khamkar (why do all Marathi househelp behave the way same in films?) take us on a scary-giggly ride through a zombie-infested suburb of Mumbai which suddenly looks like a cyclopean nightmare.

I can’t recall too many zombie flicks in Indian cinema except for Raj & DK’s Go Goa Gone which I am not particularly fond of. Maybe Saif Ali Khan’s kinky dyed hair had something to do with it. But Go Goa Gone left me cold, as did those innumerable Korean zombie films where the zombies behave like they have been binge-watching Stranger Things.

For a change, Zombivili gets the zombie formula right. It brings into the unpleasant genre a sense of purpose by showing the rich-poor divide during the zombie attack. There is a physical wall between the haves and have-nots which perforce vanishes when the city is under attack. Still, there is the highrise jerk who turns his nose up in the air and sneers at the common folks who are trying to save their skin and flesh from these freshly-recruited ghouls who just can’t get enough food for their sickened souls.

I wish I could say the same about our appetite for the mirthfully macabre milieu that director Aditya Sarpotdar so painstakingly puts together into a panic-driven pastiche of scares and chuckles. After a while all the running around gets tiresome and you wish it would end, so everyone can go home.

Sure, Zombivili is deprived of the slickness that swathes the sickness of zombie fiction in Korean cinema. There is a supremely slender line between the ghoulish and the foolish. Zombivili seems aware of how to stay on the sensible side of the fence even as the entire incident goes up into a la-la-land zone. The characters, though driven by an exacerbated anxiety, come across as believable. While the cast-effective actors furnish a feisty fusion of fears and farce, Lalit Prabhakar doing a mix of Govinda and Arshad Warsi is a riot. For those of us who were fortunate enough to have seen this young Marathi actor in Anandi Gopal , Lalit Prabhakar is unrecognizable in this Tapori avatar.

Zombivili is not a great work of cinema: it doesn’t aspire to be, It wants to tell an engaging story that keeps the audience laughing and jump scaring for two hours. Within its limited aspirations, this film succeeds far better than some of Bollywood’s recent lowbrow entertainers.

Speaking of mankind hurled into an extreme crisis, in the Tamil film Anbirkiniyal a girl gets herself locked in a freezer of a deserted mall. 2018’s Malayalam hit  Helen gets a fully faithful remake in Tamil, this time over-sweetened in tone. The father-daughter relationship that forms the core of this survival story is served up with dollops of extra whipped cream. The initial scenes are so treacly and over-cute in tone, I thought I was watching one of those sponsored evangelical heal-the-world films.

Make Mili from Hrishikesh Mukherjee ’s film ten times more of an angelic busybody, and we have Anbi (Keerthi Pandian) in this film. She gives medicines to the elderly and even promises to find a boyfriend for an elderly lady who does an awful impersonation of a coy virgin (please give the award for the hammiest performance to the lady).

Anbi’s rapport with her father verges on the obsessive. He can’t leave her alone for a minute. No wonder she disappears on him.

This is where the film sheds its plastic plumes and gets down to some serious suspense with Anbi accidentally getting locked for the night in a freezer of a mall with only frozen chicken and live rat for company. The young actress who gets herself into this awful predicament has worked hard on looking panic-stricken and anxious, though she is no patch on the sunny-faced Anna Ben in the original Malayalam film.

There, I said it! We always tend to compare the remake unfavourably, though here I must say the remake is so faithful it renders the process of adaptation totally irrelevant. Why a scene-by-scene remake when we already have the original available on the streaming platform? Having said that I must admit this Tamil take on the original is not an entire loss. The father and the boyfriend (Praveen Raja)’s frantic night-long frantic search for the missing girl still conveys a sense of panic and urgency although we know exactly how it will culminate.

The cruel apathy of the cop on duty cannot ring false no matter how many times we see it on screen. Also, some of the key rabble-rousing moments from the original are intact. Watch out for a sequence where a jailed criminal in the police station helps a Good Cop to extricate vital information on the missing girl from the Bad Cop.

Also, the way the hostility between Anbi’s father (Arun Pandian) and his daughter’s boyfriend melts as the night of crisis progresses, is convincing. If you have not seen the original then watching this remake is not a bad idea. But if you want to suspend the opportunity to watch Janhvi Kapoor play the same role in Hindi, then give this one the skip.

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.

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