All India Rank: Review

Sabatini poster, take me home.

Of all the ‘90s ephemera in All India Rank, it’s a pinup of the Argentine tennis player that whisked me back most effortlessly to my teenage years. Like Vivek (Bodhisattva Sharma), the dreamy protagonist of Varun Grover’s film, I grew up in Lucknow. I mooned over Sabatini. I had the same Sachin poster on my wall. I wore out my cassette with the Rangeela soundtrack. The comparisons end there. I ran from mathematics and the sciences, while Vivek is an accomplished enough student that his father hopes he might get into IIT one day.

Vivek’s hopes… well, they’re a work in progress. He seems more diligent than brilliant, which, given the crazy competition at Kota—where he’s been enrolled by his father in one of the town’s coaching institutes—might not be enough. A number of his classmates are presumably spurred on by a burning desire to be accepted in one of the IITs. But Vivek doesn’t seem to share this dream. He’s in Kota because he doesn’t have the courage or the vocabulary to say no to his father, or to offer a coherent alternate life plan (and at that age, why would he?). He pines for home and only starts to open up when he becomes friends with fellow students Chandan (Neeraj), Rinku (Ayush Pandey) and Sarika (Samta Sudiksha).  

The film divides its time between Kota and Vivek's parents back home. His mother runs a PCO and worries about her only son; she’s played by Geeta Agarwal, who appeared in last year’s 12th Fail as a mother whose son has joined a coaching institute in another city. Vivek’s father, RK Singh (Shashi Bhushan), a timid government employee, has transferred all his dreams onto his son’s reluctant shoulders. His inability to stick up for himself sees him suspended from office after the Independence Day cake he orders turns up with an upside-down Tricolour (“Are you a man or a marble?” his wife asks him, a taunt so funny he can’t help but laugh). 

This is Grover’s first film as director; he’s also written the script and the lyrics to Mayukh-Mainak’s playful songs. The charming lo-fi animated opening titles reminded me of Katha (1983)—and you can feel the spirit of Sai Paranjpye in the film’s shifting friendships and comedy of everyday struggles. Though there’s too much at stake for Chandan, Rinku and Vivek to become like the slacker trio of Chashme Buddoor, a few more years of (relative) failure might get them there. All India Rank is a third-generation descendent of the slice-of-life films made by Paranjpye, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee. But Grover innovates by introducing moments of surreal whimsy—like when it starts raining pencils and erasers, or the eccentric montage with a parable about Buddhist monks narrated by Sheeba Chadha’s cool professor and scored with a modified ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’. 

All India Rank’s nostalgia is distinguished by its specificity. Chandan replies enigmatically to a question about his duplicitous behaviour by saying he likes the Shah Rukh of Darr, not of Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. Vivek and his buddies hanging out in their hostel room is soundtracked with Indian Ocean: not ‘Kandisa’ (too obvious) but ‘Village Damsel’. A young pervert uses the fake name ‘Shawn Michaels’—one of the great heels of that wrestling era. When RK Singh smokes one of his three illicit cigarettes of the year (he only gives in on national holidays), he takes them out of a Fargo Gas Mantles tin that probably dates back to the ‘60s. 

I found myself more taken by the Lucknow passages than the Kota ones. It helps that Agarwal and Bhushan are beautifully paired, conveying a real sense of two people who’ve spent decades together. Their chemistry isn’t matched by the relationships formed in Kota. The friendship of Vivek, Chandan and Rinku isn’t memorable enough for a third-act rift to have much emotional impact; Vivek and Sarika’s attraction, likewise, is too halting. Bodhisattva Sharma may be wide-eyed by design but is not yet the kind of presence that can hold a film together. Neither is there much new in the film’s depiction of the grueling entrance exam ecosystem. This might be down to timing. Higher education has been the focus of several films and shows in recent years, and a lot of these storylines feel like they’re played out. 

RK’s slow realization that he’s pushed his son too hard leads to a wonderful scene. Fumblingly, he offers a safety net, telling Vivek that life is vast and many-splendoured and bigger than IIT. It’s practically a summation of ‘Yeh Jeewan Hai’ from Piya Ka Ghar, which he sings in an earlier scene where he’s consoling his wife. “Calculus is the language of change,” the young quartet are told. Yet, it's the old guard feeling their way towards change that's at the heart of All India Rank.   

 This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Bob Marley: One Love: Review

I wonder if Reinaldo Marcus Green, director of Bob Marley: One Love, knows his film has a perpetual sticker in the lower right corner of the screen in Indian theatres. This is a film about Rastafari, so someone’s always smoking ganja. And if someone’s smoking in a film that plays in India, there will be a statutory warning plastered on screen. Baffling censor interventions, terrible audiences, prohibitive pricing: India becomes a worse place to watch movies with each passing year. 

Green was probably hired off the back of his Venus and Serena Williams film, King Richard, which showed he could handle a big-ticket biopic. Yet, there were warning signs in that 2021 film that Green wasn’t ready—or able—to push the Hollywood biopic out of its comfort zone. We see this in One Love, which lacks even the surface-level toughness of King Richard. The Bob Marley we’re introduced to at the start is already a legend—the only suspense is whether he’ll ascend to the level of messiah. 

By the mid-70s, Marley is the king of reggae music and a mass hero in a country weighed down by poverty and violence. With the island gearing up for a divisive election, he announces a peace concert, but is sent reeling after gunmen try to kill him. Marley decamps to England with his entourage, where he plays football, basks in his celebrity, and searches for inspiration for a record that he hopes will change the face of music. 

We see the album take shape. Marley hears a bandmate playing the main theme to the Paul Newman film Exodus. The word, with its Biblical implications, strikes something in him, and he gathers the band. He starts singing. The percussionist taps on a conga, the guitarist lays down some bluesy licks. Lines arrive fully formed. Soon they have the first draft of a classic, and a title for the record: Exodus. It’s a wonderful scene—one of the few where Marley’s music is allowed to exist separate from his legend. 

There are musical connections to be made, but the film doesn’t seem interested. In one scene, Marley and his band watch, half-bemused, half-impressed, as The Clash belt out ‘White Riot’. Might their version of ‘Police and Thieves’, a cover of a Jamaican hit, have been a more thoughtful choice, pointing to the deep influence of reggae on the British music scene then? The film opts for the most boring spiritual crisis—a mild corruption of Marley’s soul, aided by music biz insiders, eventually nipped in the bud by his exasperated wife, Rita (Lashana Lynch). Every time Marley struggles or despairs, Green trots out the same uninspired dream sequence: Bob as a child in front of a burning field, a man on a horse looming nearby.

Kingsley Ben-Adir is a sweet, passive Marley. The British actor, who played Malcolm X in One Night in Miami and Barack Obama in The Comedy Rule, manages the thick, musical patois admirably (his grandparents were from Trinidad & Tobago; Lynch, also British, is of Jamaican descent). But I found his performance lacking motive force, whereas Lynch takes her scenes by the scruff of the neck. There’s one moment when he explodes into violence, and it seems forced because it’s at odds with everything we’ve seen before.

The film is shot by Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood), co-written by Terence Winter (The Sopranos) and produced by Dede Gardner and Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment. All the right people, but the vibes are off. Every now and then, a woman’s voice hums meaningfully on the soundtrack, a painfully Hollywood choice. I was reminded of the last famous-person biopic I liked, Ridley Scott's Napoleon, which broke free of the tyranny of accents by not doing them at all. That film had interest in its subject but little reverence. It’s the other way around with One Love, which could stand to be less respectful, and less afraid to stir it up.  

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

The Holdovers: Review

“You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?” Paul Hunham accepts this without protest. The schoolteacher has just admitted to a long-standing ambition to finish a monograph he once started. Even fantasy can't expand this into a full book. 

How well this rebuke applies not just to Paul Hunham but to Paul Giamatti. The actor has a few achievers in his filmography (John Adams in the HBO miniseries) and a few cheerful helpers (his boxing coach in Cinderella Man). But it’s mostly been a long line of grumblers, self-flagellators and misanthropes, his career-making turn as the caustic oenophile in Sideways, his sad-sack portrayal of underground comics legend Harvey Pekar in American Splendor, the perennially trumped US Attorney in the TV series Billions. All those dreams denied, deferred, drained of their vitality—Giamatti, 56, is one of the most engrossing essayers of American failure.

Paul teaches history at Barton, an elite New England boarding school. Though he likes the subject, he has contempt for his pampered charges and his servile colleagues. The film opens in the run up to Christmas, 1970, with students readying to leave for the holidays. All except a group of five—the holdovers of the title—who, for various reasons, can’t be with their families that year. Paul, to his disgust, is tasked with watching over them, with the help of the school cook, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who’s recently lost her son in Vietnam. 

The most interesting of the holdovers is Angus Tully, whose mother has gone on vacation with her new husband. He’s a smart kid with a big mouth, clearly more evolved than the garden-variety rich brats that populate the school. Soon, he’s the only one left, the other students making a grateful exit by helicopter (Angus’ mom isn’t reachable, so he doesn’t have permission). As the disappointed Angus acts out, he clashes with the unbending professor. It culminates in a sequence where Angus, with little to lose, runs through the empty school building, followed by a wheezing Paul, who even here can’t shake his professorial turn of phrase (“You are careening towards detention”; “Do not cross the Rubicon”). 

Fun as it is to watch Sessa make Giamatti puff up with frustration, The Holdovers is after something more resonant. After Angus injures himself, a worried Paul takes him to the hospital to get patched up. They stop at a diner on the way back, where Angus—a magnet for trouble—runs afoul of two locals, one with a hook for a hand (he looks like Elliot Gould in M.A.S.H—the Korean war comedy released that year). Later, when Angus complains that Paul took their side, the teacher asks, rhetorically, if anyone he knows has had their limbs blown off in Vietnam. He says it gently, though, perhaps grateful that the boy bailed him out at the hospital by not contacting his family and getting him fired. 

Right from the first image—a vintage certification card—The Holdovers harks back to an older era of American film. Alexander Payne’s work has always contained traces of New Hollywood, but the '70s setting makes the lineage clearer. Hal Ashby in particular informs the unsentimental comic tone; Cat Stevens on the soundtrack is likely Payne’s nod to the 1971 film Harold and Maude. It helps that Giamatti has an innate ability to seem at ease in any era, and newcomer Sessa somehow has an Altman face, a Warhol face and a Forman face.  

The Holdovers is an improvement on that other film about a troubled boy at an elite school helped by a crusty old man. Scent of a Woman has an inexplicable reputation as a classic and Al Pacino’s faintly ridiculous Oscar-winning performance. I was reminded of Pacino’s scornful ‘Baird man’ each time someone said ‘Barton man’ in The Holdovers. Payne’s film clears Martin Brest’s 1992 one easily: it’s funnier, better written and performed, and no one’s forcing out tears for a blind colonel. 

The film’s emotional anchor is Mary—though she herself might feel adrift in her sorrow. She doesn’t suffer fools, but even at her most exasperated she’s able to remember that Angus is a scared kid who deserves their sympathy (“Don’t fuck it up for the little asshole,” she scolds Paul). Randolph is a pleasure to watch as someone who’s barely keeping it together for herself (she drinks through much of the film), yet manages to keep the group together. 

Paul Hunham is the sort of role that comes the way of a lucky few actors after decades of hard work. It’s as if the wine obsessive from Sideways realized, like Noriko in Tokyo Story, that life is disappointing, and gave up raging. But Payne’s older too, and this time after acceptance there’s kindness and redemption. 

 This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya: Review

It's such a perfectly calibrated performance there's only a hint of a robot. The glassy stare. The fixed smile. The struggle with simple sentences. But enough about Dharmendra. 

Robotics engineer Aryan (Shahid Kapoor) has been summoned to the US by his boss and doting aunt, Urmila (Dimple Kapadia), to work on a secret project. Instead of telling him what it is, she sends him to her apartment, where her manager is waiting. Sifra (Kriti Sanon) is attractive and extremely capable, organising Aryan’s wardrobe and whipping up a sushi dinner. She’s eager to please, he’s immediately smitten, and they end up in bed. The next morning, when she tells him her battery is low, he doesn’t realise she means it literally.

Urmila turns up soon after to inform her nephew he’s just slept with a robot, that this was an experiment to see how her latest creation (13 years in the making) interacts with a human. The problem is, Aryan has caught feelings. Now, this isn't the worst setup for a romantic comedy. But Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya—not a title that rolls off the tongue—is too convinced of its premise to put in the work of selling it. What might have been an agreeably silly comedy becomes a painfully unfunny one, as Aryan convinces his aunt to send Sifra to Delhi to test her out on his family. 

While an uncanny imitation of a human being, Sifra is very much a machine, with code for thoughts and no agency. But Aryan’s family is so relieved he’s finally brought a girl home, and so impressed by how she takes over the housework, that they ignore Sifra’s tics. She doesn’t actually love Aryan—it’s her programming reacting to his feelings. You’d think this would start to matter to him but he just grows more infatuated. Bear in mind, this is Shahid Kapoor, not the Joaquin Phoenix of Her. Aryan isn’t some lonely kook; he spends the whole film fending off the affections of besotted women.  

Two hours in, the stakes are exactly where they were in America. An obvious twist would be for Sifra to develop some human feeling—for the machine to start learning. But writer-directors Amit Joshi and Aradhana Sah do not extend themselves beyond robot-impersonating-human gags (when they do, it’s to make fun of domestic workers). At one point, Sifra’s memory is wiped clean. Finally, I thought, a chance for Aryan to face up to the blank slate he’s fallen for. No such luck. A ‘backup memory’ is arranged and he’s back to smiling at her like a goof.   

Joshi and Sah have a handful of writing credits each, but this is their first time directing. Maybe producer Maddock Films imposed the Looney Tunes sound effects and the laboured family scenes on them, but you have to wonder if the makers thought anything through. Like how the ideal bahu syncs up so well with the ultimate Indian male fantasy: a pretty, poised and amenable cook and carer. Aryan is genuinely in love with Sifra, but he also explains to his friend that mentally “she’s like a little girl”. Do the implications of this occur to him? Or that he's drunkenly kissing her as she's updating and seemingly comatose?

In the 1975 film The Stepford Wives, a newcomer to a small town starts noticing that all the wives are strangely subservient. Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya is so undercooked it misses the obvious satirical point—that Indian families wouldn’t notice a robot under their noses if it made their lives easier. Instead, we get jokes about chargers and motherboards and preset reminders. Stepford Wives is too ambitious, this film wants to be Small Wonder.  

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Time after time: ‘The Delinquents’ and ‘Sixty Minutes’

"We have to find some sort of advantage. Outside, they don’t have any. And in here we have plenty of it. Time.” Morán (Daniel Elías), glowering and bloodied, listens to Garrincha (Germán de Silva) in the prison yard. He’s lingered too long on the communal phone and earned himself a beating. Soon, he’ll be paying a tribute to the old con for the privilege of an ‘easy time’ in prison. It’s unlikely he’s paying attention to the lecture, yet this is the most direct invocation of a central theme in The Delinquents: the passage of time.

Rodrigo Moreno’s 2023 film, streaming on MUBI, goes nowhere fast, in ways that are initially surprising and then beguiling. It’s three hours long, but Moreno doesn’t use the expansive length as many directors might, to add characters and subplots. Instead, there are discursions, repetitions, reveries. Time expands gently, turning our viewing meditative.

The overarching joke is that The Delinquents is, on the face of it, a heist movie. Indeed, the first 24 minutes detail the most leisurely bank robbery you are ever likely to see. Morán, a clerk in a Buenos Aires bank, goes about his day and eventually walks out with $650,000. Later, he meets up with Roman, a colleague from the bank. He tells him about the theft and proposes a deal: he will confess and go to jail for three years, while Roman keeps the money safe and splits it with him when he’s out. Roman isn’t keen but, after some convincing and a casual threat to implicate him, he agrees.

Roman—increasingly nervous to keep the money in the apartment he shares with his girlfriend—takes Morán’s advice and heads to the remote countryside. He stashes the loot there, and on the way back comes across three friendly strangers, who invite him over to share their lunch. He’s immediately infatuated with one of the women, who’s as carefree as he’s careworn. It’s the start of his growing realisation that, with the security of money, he now has time to reflect, even waste. We see him relax, speak ramblingly about a doggerel he once heard, play a geography game.

Visually too, Moreno shows time unfolding unhurriedly. Scenes are allowed to play out as they would in life—a cigarette break, a scooter pursuing a bus. The transitions are uniquely distended, images superimposed for 10, 15 seconds. It might sound like slow cinema but strikes me as more light-footed than what that genre usually offers. There’s Rohmer in the film’s talkiness and sun-kissed photography (by Alejo Maglio and Inés Duacastella), and Rivette and Ruiz in its sense of mischief (the names of five principal characters are anagrams). A revelation kicks off the final third of the film but this is just an excuse for the narrative to loop back in time and start another cycle of gradual self-discovery.

This piece was published in Mint Lounge.

Fighter: Review

A minute into Fighter and we already have an inshallah, an Alhamdulillah and a jihad (for Kashmir). There are more janaabs uttered in this film than in Pakeezah. A dreaded Pakistani pilot wears more kohl than Deepika Padukone has in her last three films. A Pakistani general reminisces about the time they “brought terror to the valleys of Kashmir” and admits “Jaesh is better than us, they get the job done”. The Indian defence minister says, “Sometimes the path to justice is revenge.”

So this is what a Siddharth Anand film looks like without the restraining hand of YRF. I say this with massive caveats. Pakistan is a ready and mostly caricatured villain in the YRF Spyverse. But the ongoing series has given us Zoya and Rubai, patriotic Pakistani spies as leads in Hindi action films. Tiger 3 ends with Pakistani schoolkids playing the Indian national anthem—a rather meaningless gesture, but a gesture nonetheless. Fighter, produced by Anand’s Marflix and Viacom18, has no use for such liberal weakness. Pakistani military, ISI, Jaesh, Kashmiris—they’re all the same, unruly offspring waiting to be taught a lesson by their baap, India.

At an air force base in Srinagar, a team of skilled fliers assembles. Padukone, playing chopper pilot Minal Rathore (‘Mini’), gets a proper guitars-shades-and-slomo Siddharth Anand entry. So does Hrithik Roshan’s Shamsher Pathania (‘Patty’) a minute later, though this one’s too much like Kabir’s walk across the tarmac in War and is missing a smitten Tiger Shroff. The team—which includes Bash (Akshay Oberoi), Taj (Karan Singh Grover) and a few others—is briefed by captain Rakesh ‘Rocky’ Jaisingh (Anil Kapoor), who’s visibly frosty towards Patty. Mini, though, is immediately drawn to the star pilot—you might say he takes her breath away. 

Funny you should ask, yes, there’s a lot of Top Gun in Fighter. Patty is a cocksure flier whose arrogance and propensity for risk-taking keeps getting him in trouble. If this isn’t enough, he’s haunted by the death of a fellow pilot (there’s a related subplot from Maverick thrown in, rather half-heartedly). But there’s one big difference. In both Top Gun and Maverick, the identity of the enemy is vague to the point of abstraction. The only identified adversary is Maverick's own demons.

There’s no way a Hindi film in 2024 is going to have an abstract enemy. Even so, I was struck by the film’s demonic framing of Pakistan and the trash-talk that stands in for India's foreign policy. “Unhe dikhaana padega baap kaun hai (we’ll show them who daddy is),” the prime minister (or so it appears) says. “Maalik hum hain!” Patty shouts mid-fight, referring to Kashmir. His laughable threat of ‘IOP’—Indian Occupied Pakistan—immediately after deflects from the ugliness of saying India is Kashmir’s maalik, owner. 

If I could put all this aside, I’d tell you that Fighter intermittently resembles a Siddharth Anand film in that it’s nifty-looking and fluidly sexy and somewhat daffy. Roshan looks fine in uniform and his peacocking is amusing, if overdone. Sanchit and Ankit Balhara’s score is as earwormy as their work on Pathaan. The aerial combat is a lot better than I expected (Pathaan was awful in the air), though the memory of Maverick is likely still too fresh to escape comparison. But Anand is missing Sridhar Raghavan and Abbas Tyrewala, his YRF writing partners (Ramon Chibb, Hussain Dalal and Abbas Dalal are the writers here). It’s not just the sledgehammer jingoism, you feel Raghavan and Tyrewala’s loss in the quieter moments too, like when Patty and Mini are flirting in his kitchen and the witless dialogue leaves the actors stranded. Or Mini meeting her estranged parents, a scene so schmaltzy even Padukone’s otherworldly crying abilities can’t salvage it.

There are plugs for Zomato and Asian Paints but what’s really being advertised is the Indian Air Force, both as a place of clubby good cheer and a chance to be the only kind of Indian worthy of absolute respect. I was amused to see thanks extended not only to the ministry of defence, the air force and a plethora of military personnel but even to the defence ministry’s review committee, through which all films made on the armed forces must pass. Let’s assume all Indian soldiers are supremely patriotic and self-sacrificing and beacons of humanity. Can we save some time in future films and put all this as a statutory warning whenever they’re on screen? 

Like all Hindi war films made after 2019, Fighter is beholden to Uri: The Surgical Strike. But there’s an interesting tonal change. Aditya Dhar’s film was deadly serious, to the extent that it made the army seem like a taxing and gloomy profession. The lines that carried an electric charge back then are, after years of imitation, less startling now. “How’s the josh?” becomes a joke over dinner in Fighter. “Ghar mein ghus ke maarenge” is also made fun of—by Pakistani terrorists. The rhetoric of eight years ago becomes the tagline of five years ago becomes the punchline of today.

Uri was released a few months before the 2019 general elections. It stressed the role of the BJP government, at the centre in 2016, in carrying out the retaliatory attacks in Uri. Fighter has a similar line about how, in the last 50 years, no government (before Modi's) had given a fitting response to Pakistan. But apart from this, the establishment is curiously absent in what is unquestionably an establishment film. As another election looms, maybe that’s the big change from five years ago. Why bother claiming victories everyone already assumes are yours? 

This piece was published in Mint Lounge. 

Merry Christmas: Review

Movies playing in the Bombay of Merry Christmas: Weekend at Dunkirk, Rebecca, The Merry Widow; 1964, 1940, 1934. Pinochhio, from the looks of the poster not the 1940 Disney one. “Albert Pinto ko gussa kyon aata hai?”, someone asks, so it’s 1980 or later. And it’s before 1995—‘When Mumbai was Bombay’. Clearly the year isn’t important. “Let’s time travel,” Maria (Katrina Kaif) tells Albert (Vijay Sethupathi), something Sriram Raghavan has always encouraged in his films, where a 1950s Hindi cabaret number and a 1970s Italian pulp novel might not just coexist but cohabitate. 

Lonely, unhappy Albert is back home in Bombay after seven years. Drinking in a restaurant on Christmas Eve, he comes across Maria and her young mute daughter. They get to talking and though both are guarded, something clicks. As he walks them home, she confides that her husband, Jerome, is cheating on her. She invites him up, puts the child to sleep, offers him a drink. The mood turns festive, then romantic. But there’s always something keeping us on edge: a mutilated doll; a record player blasting Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, the sound of crisis, of frantic action. 

Action, though, is a long time coming in Merry Christmas. Most of the first hour is Albert and Maria exchanging sad life stories (her husband is truly evil; he’s haunted by a marriage proposal that never was) and flirting and walking around festive Colaba. A surprising amount of silence punctuates their conversations—intended, perhaps, as wistful pauses, but hanging like dead air. The progress is careful and rather inert. One of the people thanked in the opening credits is Eric Rohmer: not an obvious choice for Raghavan, who seems more a Chabrol guy. It’s the Rohmer-ian aspects of this film that fall flat: the circular conversations, the forensic study of attraction.  

With the right pair of actors, this might have gone differently. But Kaif and Sethupathi, a fascinating idea on paper, never find a rhythm here. Directors are still figuring out how to use Sethupathi in Hindi films and series; he was perfect in Farzi, atrocious in Jawan. The impression is of an actor learning his lines phonetically; often he’ll hit the wrong word and it’ll deflate the humour or the poetry (his performance in the Tamil version of Merry Christmas might play differently). Kaif is professional and sometimes moving, but there’s a formality to her acting that acts as a ceiling. When more malleable performers turn up—Sanjay Kapoor, Ashwini Kalsekar—you can sense the effort in Kaif.

Raghavan, adapting pulp mainstay Frédéric Dard with Anukriti Pandey and regular co-writers Pooja Ladha Surti and Arijit Biswas, starts to build ominously around the halfway mark, leading to a flurry of twists (perhaps mimicking the gathering squall of In the Hall of the Mountain King). Maria’s apartment becomes a crime scene, though we’re not sure who the criminal is, or how many there are. It becomes clear why so much care was taken to establish details in the initial stretch; whether hindsight makes those scenes better is debatable. Albert reveals an important bit of his past—it’s shocking in a way that’s at odds with everything else, a Badlapur detail in a Andhadhun-like film.  

Sanjay Kapoor’s lecherous jollity sparks Merry Christmas alive. It gives Sethupathi and Kaif something to play off of—and Vinay Pathak’s wry detective is a welcome late addition. Still, the interrogation scenes don’t sing like the Shefali Shah-Alia Bhatt-Vijay Maurya ones in Darlings, or the Radhika Apte-Rajkummar Rao ones in Monica, O My Darling, both decidedly Raghavan-esque films. 

Some of the touches are pure joy. The film’s split-screen opening: two mixer-grinders, one filled with spices, the other with pills (the capper: a wedding ring added to the ground masala). Rajesh Khanna’s face on a paper stub with a line of encouragement—or is it a warning? All those roses: Rose mansion; another Rosie in an unhappy marriage; ‘Night Rose’, the horny scribblings of a teen; the ghost of Red Rose, a 1980 film in which Khanna plays a killer (it’s based on a Tamil film with Kamal Haasan; in the Tamil version of this film, Kamal’s face replaces Khanna’s on the stub). In these moments, Merry Christmas hits the dark comic romantic notes it’s reaching for. Yet, too often, it’s out of time, marginally off-key.

This review was published in Lounge.