Murder Mubarak: Review

For about a decade and a half after the release of Khosla Ka Ghosla in 2006, we made Delhi films well. After decades of neglect and cliche, there were all these different accents, experiences, subcultures… Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, Dev.D, Band Baaja Baaraat, Dilli-6, Piku, Titli, Queen. Recently, though, it feels like we’re back to seeing the city through a Mumbai gaze, to watching Punjabi aunties coo at their labradoodles and angry Jats question your relations with your sister.

Even if you’re trying to skewer something, it’s stronger if it comes from a place of affection. But Murder Mubarak has no fondness for Delhi, and it shows in the kind of ugly caricatures it offers. At the elite Royal Delhi Club, trainer Leo (Aashim Gulati) is found dead, his weights apparently slipping from his grip and crushing him. ACP Bhavani (Pankaj Tripathi), assigned the case days before he leaves for Lucknow to join his wife, immediately declares it a murder (they’d eat up Bhavani’s relaxed, grandiloquent speaking style in Lucknow).  

There’s a large list of well-heeled suspects: minor royalty Rannvijay (Sanjay Kapoor); Shehnaz (Karisma Kapoor), a former movie star now doing horror schlock; garrulous aunties Cookie (Dimple Kapadia) and Roshni (Tisca Chopra); Roshni’s druggie son Yash (Suhail Nayyar); rich kid Bambi (Sara Ali Khan) and her lawyer friend, the one outsider, Akash (Vijay Varma). It turns out Leo was blackmailing nearly everyone, so there’s plenty of motive to go around. In his gentle way, Bhavani starts pulling the rug out from under everyone’s feet. 

This ensemble has potential for inspired silliness but director Homi Adajania can’t corral them effectively. Sanjay Kapoor is usually one of the funnier bit players in Hindi film, but here he’s just loud and one-note—and the same goes for Kapadia. Khan and Varma get a love story to play (they're longtime friends but she got married, now her husband is dead but he's seeing someone); though it's a large part of the film—long at 142 minutes—it’s not particularly involving. I like the way Tripathi goes about playing the inspector, pontificating like a Hindi professor, gently requesting where most detectives would demand. But this performance suffers because the flamboyant ones aren’t pitched right—I’d compare it unfavourably to Neeyat, not that much better a murder mystery but with a wittier cast of moneyed despicables.    

Besides a handful of other screenplays, Gazal Dhaliwal and Suprotim Sengupta have a sparkling comedy each under their respective belts: Qarib Qarib Single in the former’s case, Meri Pyaari Bindu in the latter’s. Their source material here is promising: Anuja Chauhan’s satirical murder mystery Club You To Death. But something goes wrong in Murder Mubarak, which struggles to offer a plausible whodunit and has neither the language nor the incisiveness to skewer Delhi high society in ways we haven’t seen before. 

There must be someone high up at Maddock Films who thinks the average viewer is a rube who won’t understand a joke unless it’s accompanied by a musical cue that shouts ‘JOKE!’. Hindi comedies tend to lean heavily on their scores anyway, but Maddock is a serial offender. I’d mentioned Dasvi’s brass farts in my review, and my notes for Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya have ‘score awful’ underlined violently. And now there’s Murder Mubarak, whose misfiring gags have accompanying bleeps and honks and trills. Every joke fails twice. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Yodha: Review

The opening 15 minutes of Yodha are pure military-patriotism porn. There's the formation of a special task force called Yodha, its founder (Ronit Roy) passing on the legacy to his teenage son, Arun, before dying in the field. Then, in 2001, on the Indo-Bangladesh border, Arun (Malhotra), now a Yodha soldier himself, disobeys orders (“No one taught me how to negotiate”), single-handedly wipes out a contingent of terrorists and sets off a saffron, white and green flare. One love song later, Arun is back in action, this time aboard a hijacked plane. At this point, something weird happens. The film starts to get better.  

It may seem like I’m damning Yodha with faint praise, but I really didn’t expect Sagar Ambre and Pushkar Ojha’s film to tighten its hold on me as it went along. This is partly because commercial Hindi cinema of late has erased hope from my life, and partly because of Malhotra’s track record. His last two actioners were the dunderheaded spy film Mission Majnu and the risible Rohit Shetty series, Indian Police Force. It’s a familiar problem with Hindi action: the stars best suited for it—Malhotra, Tiger Shroff, Vidyut Jammwal—are usually in terrible films.

Yodha kicks into gear as Arun’s fortunes plummet. He's unable to prevent the hijack, and the plane takes off with a nuclear scientist; though the government negotiates with the terrorists, they return his dead body. Yodha is blamed and suspended indefinitely. The film then jumps ahead a few years, with Pakistani terrorists planning to disrupt a trip by the Indian ‘head of state’ (the film indicates, but seems reluctant to say, ‘prime minister’) to Pakistan by activating an unnamed Indian spy. In the next scene, Arun, about to board a flight to Dubai, gets a text message to get on a flight to London instead. With the plane about to take off, he gets another message saying a hijack is underway. 

This is the best passage of the film: a hijacking with no outward signs of one. It’s a while before the spy’s identity is revealed, and the film makes good use of Malhotra’s confused energy as he engages the help of flight attendant Laila (Disha Patani) and trainee pilot Tanya (Kritika Bharadwaj), and keeps an eye on a shifty-looking passenger. A brutal, quick fight in the bathroom keeps the pressure on. The tension is only relieved with a stunning, chaotic sequence where Arun battles the now-revealed terrorist as the plane shudders through turbulence and they’re tossed around the cabin.

Sunil Rodrigues and Craig Macrae continue their fine run as action directors after Pathaan and Jawan. They build everything around their star’s grounded style: a faux one-er, a couple of close-quarters brawls, gunfighting and explosives at the end. Malhotra doesn’t have the expansive skills of Shroff or Jammwal, but he’s a very convincing no-nonsense fighter. There’s barely any slo-mo or stop-start action—a welcome change for an Indian film. 

Ambre (also the writer) and Ojha are first-time directors; like Macrae and Rodrigues, they worked on Pathaan. Their film follows Tiger 3 in staging a terrorist threat on Pakistani soil so India can play saviour. It’s difficult to say whether this patronizing attitude is better than the pantomime villainy of the Pakistanis in, say, Fighter. As usual, Kashmir is the hook to hang all the nation's problems on. Having Arun’s estranged wife, Priyamvada (Raashii Khanna), as secretary to the PM who doubles up as hostage negotiator and Big Decision Taker is about as convincing as these things usually are. This is solid genre fare without a single deep thought. In 2024, in Hindi cinema, it’ll do.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Hearing the Holocaust in ‘The Zone of Interest’

“Did you hear that?” Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) asks a subordinate in German. They’re riding horses beside a field with tall weeds. We assume he’s referring to the agitated shouts just off-screen. But then he says, “It’s a bittern. A heron. A Eurasian grey heron.” They ride into the field in search of the bird, past the shouting Germans on horses herding along a line of prisoners obscured by the grasses.

When I revisited the scene, I noticed that there is indeed a bird call. It’s an example of what makes Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone Of Interest (2023) a uniquely devastating Holocaust film. Unlike so many other films about Nazi Germany, the atrocities are all off-screen. It’s set in Auschwitz but we don’t see the internees. But we hear them, and the sounds of the genocidal factory system at work. It’s a rarity in cinema—a purely aural horror film.

The first challenge thrown at the viewer is one of sound: a black, empty screen following the film’s title. For three minutes, Mica Levi’s watery score is the only thing to engage with. After a minute, there’s a sudden cut to the countryside and bright sunlight, as we see the Höss family at a picnic. In an interview to Rolling Stone, Glazer, director of Sexy Beast and Under The Skin, explained how he wanted this to be a kind of guide for the viewer. “It was a way of tuning your ears before you tune your eyes to what you’re about to view. There is the movie you see here—and there is the movie you hear.”

The movie we hear is one of great violence and suffering. The movie we see is pristine, bucolic. The home of the Höss family—Rudolf, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) and their five children—is right next door to the concentration camp he’s responsible for running. But they could be separated by an ocean for all it affects them. Hedwig takes tea in the garden, the kids splash in the pool, seemingly immune to the constant din of shouts, screams, barks, and the terrifying low noise of factories and furnaces. 

The visual information is minimal—like the disturbingly beautiful shot of smoke above the treetops from a train bringing in more internees—so one must parse the soundtrack for clues. Mostly Glazer lets the sounds remain indistinct, but on occasion they are audible, and subtitled. One of the Höss boys, maybe three or four, is playing by himself in his room. He hears distant raised voices and, curious, walks to the window. “What’s he done?” someone asks. Fighting over a stolen apple, he’s told. “Drown him in the river,” the voice says. The boy turns back to his room, says to no one in particular: “Don’t do that again.”

Through small, chilling moments, the film shows us how desensitised this family is to the horrors next door. Nearly all of these are built around the work of supervising sound editor Johnnie Burn and his team. In one of the most deserved awards at this year’s Oscars, Burn and Tarn Willers won for Best Sound. There’s a technical complexity and subtlety to the mix that might have impressed voters—scenes like the garden party, with its subtle layering of sounds. But I’d like to think the award was also given to this film because of how it forces the viewer to reckon with the implications of sounds. There's nothing as chilling as when the older brother locks his sibling in the greenhouse, then leers at him and hisses—the sound of the gas chambers.

The film’s boldest formal challenge, arriving towards the end, is at first visual. Without warning, the film jumps from 1943 to the present day, with the camp now a memorial to Holocaust victims. As two workers clean the premises before the day’s visitors arrive, sound again becomes important. The scrape of the brooms and the whine of the vacuum cleaner feel almost unseemly in their matter-of-factness. 

It’s a complex note to end on, to ask if time and familiarity have dimmed the horror of Auschwitz. Do we see—and hear—the signs? Or do we look past, like the Hösses? At the Oscars, hardly anyone gave an indication of hearing or seeing the protests en route to the venue against the war on Gaza. So it was heartening when Glazer, accepting the award for Best International Feature, said: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present—not to say ‘look what they did then’; rather, look what we do now… Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Laapataa Ladies: Review

There’s nothing like a good callback, the sound of a screenplay clicking into place. You can hear it several times over the course of Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies. My favourite: when Deepak (Sparsh Shrivastava) is seeking the blessings of the family elders after bringing his new bride home, his aged grandfather shouts jaagte raho (stay alert) instead of jeete raho (blessings). There’s general laughter but the explanation only arrives an hour or so later: the phrase is stuck in his head after a lifetime of saying it as a watchman. And there's a capper—a late revelation sealed by a perfectly timed jaagte raho!

Deepak’s joy at his homecoming is cut short in dramatic fashion when his wife lifts her veil and turns out to be a woman named Pushpa (Pratibha Ranta) whom he’s never seen before. On the train home to the village, there was another newly married couple, both brides dressed identically in red saris and veils covering their faces. There’s a shuffling of places, a badly timed bathroom visit, and Deepak walks out with the wrong bride (she follows because her vision is comprised by the ghoonghat—the first of many comic jabs at the ‘modesty’ expected of young women). 

After talking it over with his panicked parents, Deepak heads to the police station to file a missing person report. The officer in charge, Shyam Manohar (Ravi Kishan, in a paan-chewing turn to rival Saeed Jaffrey in Chashme Buddoor), toys with them, mocking Deepak’s predicament and the unlikeliness of the swap. In another police station far away, Pushpa's thuggish husband files a report as well. Meanwhile, Phool (Nitanshi Goel), Deepak’s wife, is waiting at an unfamiliar railway station, with no money or idea how to contact him. 

As luck would have it, the nervous, fluttering bride is the one stranded, while the self-assured Pushpa barely seems fazed by the turn her life has taken. Both take steps towards emancipation. Phool finds work assisting gruff tea-seller Manju (Chhaya Kadam) on the platform. Pushpa’s plans are more elaborate—we see her eyeing the family safe and making mysterious trips to the market, watched from a distance by a fascinated, if confused, Manohar.

As the film progressed, I found myself more and more taken with the modest poetry and intricate weaving of Sneha Desai’s screenplay (from a story by Biplab Goswami, with additional dialogue by Divyanidhi Sharma). Very little is introduced that isn’t brought back with purpose. A female police officer menacingly cracks a betel nut as Manohar deadpans, “Sports quota”. Later, when he calls for her, he’s informed she’s gone to collect the daily egg and banana allotted to sports quota government servants. There are wonderful running gags. Phool can’t remember her husband’s village, but knows it’s the name of a flower; in a bid to jog her memory, her well-wishers keep rattling off floral species, leading Manju to remark, “Bhawra bana ke rakh diya hai sabko” (you’ve turned us all into bees). 

Laapata Ladies is jauntily paced—nudged along by Ram Sampath’s charming music—yet finds time to be curious about characters other than Deepak and the brides. When we’re introduced to Manohar, he’s seated across from a woman his age who’s singing for him. When she finishes, we realize it’s been to get her errant son off the hook. Over a few deft scenes, Pushpa manages to draw out Deepak’s absent elder brother’s shy wife and encourage her talent for sketching (like the subplot in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, only watchable). Even the acidic Manju has a happy-looking kitten in her room and a running battle with a customer who just wants a little more chutney. The outside world, circa 2001, comes into view from time to time: posters for Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai and Dhadkan, newspaper reports about ‘fake’ brides, cricket on the radio (Harbhajan bowling to Ponting).             

Rao, directing her second film after 2010’s Dhobi Ghat (she's been producer on multiple projects in the interim), draws wonderful performances from a relatively unknown cast. Shrivastava conveys Deepak’s sweet infatuation and the determination underlying his hand-wringing; you can see why Phool believes he’ll eventually find her. Goel, with her girlish tones, is perfect as the wide-eyed Phool, Ranta maybe a touch too assured for this setting, even if Pushpa is clearly made for wider horizons. Kishan's boistrous turn reminded me of Claude Rains’ Captain Renault in Casablanca, another blithe, randy, corrupt cop who’s as surprised as anyone when he finds himself taking a moral stance. 

Laapata Ladies sacrifices a bit of subtlety towards the end with a series of statements about female agency. As a marker of progress, the final image is more eloquent: the reunited couple walking hand in hand down the road, her ghoonghat no longer obscuring her face. Beyond that, I have no desire to pick holes in a film this cohesive and winsome. Not all those who wander are lost, but it’s still worth celebrating Rao making her way back to directing. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Dune: Part Two: Review

There’s a moment in Dune: Part Two when Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) is having one of his visions. Until now they’ve portended things to come, but this time he sees the past. “I saw our bloodline, mother, written across time,” he tells Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), as we're shown his vision of a flaxen-haired baby. Something about the surface the child is on—sleek, black, ropy—helped my brain leap to a revelation a second before the scene confirmed it.

It’s not a difficult jump to make. Denis Villeneuve’s design sense is so consistent and exacting you can see patterns of story in it. He gives the impression, like Kubrick, of a director obsessed with every inch of the screen. There are times when Dune: Part Two explodes into action, Greig Fraser’s camera hurtling about like a desert wind. But more often Villeneuve prefers a languid or static camera, which allows the viewer to take in the otherworldly beauty of his CGI imaginings. It’s a fascinating paradox: a director tasked with making the biggest sci-fi blockbusters, but who’d seemingly rather have viewers gaze at his frames like they’re paintings.

We left Paul at the end of Dune a king without a kingdom. The Fremen are still wary of him, except for Stilgar (Javier Barden), who believes he’s special, and Chani (Zendaya), who thinks he’s neat. With their help, Paul becomes a proper desert warrior, eventually riding Shai-Hulud, the giant sandworms that the Fremen worship and harness as transport and weapons. With each step, the belief that he may be Lisan al Gaib—a messiah of legend—gains force among the Fremen. Paul himself isn’t sold on the prophesies; he just wants revenge against the Harkonnen for killing his father and the rest of House Atreides. 

Then there’s Lady Jessica, whose steeliness from the first film has only hardened. She’s convinced her son is the Kwisatz Haderach, a superbeing awaited by the Bene Gesserit order. She coldly plays on the hopes of the Fremen, drinking potentially lethal water to become their Reverend Mother, then pushing the idea that Paul is indeed Lisan al Gaib. She’s also pregnant with a daughter—and holds conversations with the embryo (only a director as unrelentingly serious as Villeneuve could have done these scenes with a straight face).

Villeneuve stages stunning guerilla raids on Harkonnen spice harvesters, Fremen fighters moving like the ghosts through their native sands. So successful are these attacks that the vicious Rabban (Dave Bautista) in replaced as ruler of Arakkis by the even crazier Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), who like all Harkonnen has a hairless marble-white body but—perhaps a mark of his advanced depravity—also a black cavern of a mouth. He’s psychotic, Lady Margot Fenring (an amused Léa Seydoux) reports back to her superiors. A bit rich, coming from the frankly unhinged sisterhood that is the Bene Gesserit. 

The visual invention of the first film—from the dragonfly-like thopters to the desert mice called Muad'Dib (which becomes Paul’s Fremen name)—is carried over and deepened in the sequel. There is outstanding work by the production design, art direction and costume teams, apart from the more spectacular contributions of VFX and Fraser’s photography. Sometimes the execution outstrips the underlying idea. Feyd-Rautha’s introductory fight is in black and white, as if to stress the binary nature of good and evil. 

Dune: Part Two, like the first one, borrows from the desert cultures, mostly Islamic, of Asia and Africa (fedayeen fighters become ‘Fedaykin’, and so on). Given the whiteness of the ‘great houses’ and the brownness and blackness of everyone else, this is a white savior narrative of galactic proportions—with the caveat that these saviors might turn out to be bad news (there will almost certainly be a third film). “Arrakis in Dune are not Iraqis in their homeland,” Hamid Dabashi wrote in an article after the first film. “They are figurative, metaphoric and metonymic. They are a mere synecdoche for a literary historiography of American Orientalism. They are tropes—mockups that are there for the white narrator to tell his triumphant story.” The Fremen in Part 2 are easily led, superstitious, always chanting and offering prayers—the stereotype of the middle-eastern ‘native’ in American films. The contempt Hollywood usually has for such characters is suspended in favour of appropriation, though even these characteristics are only adopted insofar as they’re useful, like the markings on Lady Jessica’s face. 

Butler’s nasty Feyd-Rautha is more seductive than he should be. It’s Ferguson who’s truly scary, though, the mother taken over by the zealot single-handedly creating a prophet. Everyone else is subsumed by Hans Zimmer’s deafening music and the enormity of the designs. Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts are so deep in Frank Herbert’s world they can’t come up with regular dialogue—it’s just Muad'Dib and Lisan al Gaib and Kwisatz Haderach over and over. Dune: Part Two is a monumental barrage of sound and image. It does everything but make the heart leap.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Pressure drop: ‘The Harder They Come’

Watching Bob Marley: One Love last week, I was distracted by a stray mention of Jimmy Cliff. Already exasperated with its cautiousness, I spent the rest of the biopic intermittently dreaming of The Harder They Come. Same era, same sounds, same politics, and yet this 1972 film starring Cliff is as rough and exciting as One Love is polished and inert.

By 1972, Cliff was already a hit artist, with a handful of reggae standards—'Many Rivers To Cross', the protest number ‘Vietnam’—to his name. Filmmaker Perry Henzell approached him with a script inspired by a gangster named Rhygin, who was a local sensation when Cliff was a schoolboy. They hit it off, and decided to work together. Their central character, Ivanhoe, was changed to a musician who takes up the gun. They had a certain type in mind—“an anti-hero in the way that Hollywood turns its bad guys into heroes,” Cliff recalled.

The Harder They Come opens with a near-bus collision, albeit a comic one. It’s a fitting start, for this is a film of constant disagreements and challenges and clashes. The Kingston we see is an endless series of shanty towns, where corrupt cops receive cutbacks from marijuana traders and all but a select few live in grinding poverty. Into this comes Ivan, a young man from the country. He’s a singer with no money or belongings, a hair-trigger temper and a taste for expensive toys.

Ivan manages to cut a record with a producer named Hilton (Bob Charlton), but is disgusted with the pittance he’s offered. He goes to jail after slashing a man with a knife, is humiliatingly flogged as punishment. He becomes a runner for ganja traders—even here he’s dissatisfied with his cut. Once he gets hold of a gun, you know it’s just a matter of time before he’s an outlaw. Ironically, as he gets deeper and deeper in trouble, his song becomes a sensation across the island.

There’s a clue to the kind of film Henzell is making in the early scene where the streetwise José takes Ivan, newly arrived in town, to the pictures. Sergio Corbucci’s Django is playing, the audience delighting in the bloody action. “The hero can’t die till the last reel,” José admonishes one of them. Though it isn’t as pitiless, The Harder They Come has some of the down-and-dirty spirit of a Corbucci western. The hero isn’t a moral man, or even particularly likeable, there’s barely any rule of law, and everyone’s desperate (“a hungry mob is an angry mob,” Bob Marley would sing a few years later). It’s also likely Henzell had his eye on the first rumblings of Blaxploitation in the US. Ivan’s taste for cars, nice clothes, women and guns is more in line with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft, both released in 1971, than the western outlaws he models himself on.

For all its debts to the gangster film and the western, The Harder They Come is at heart a musical. The soundtrack is blessedly Marley-free. You have ‘Pressure Drop’ by The Maytals, a track so electrifying it’s used several times in the film. There’s ‘007 (Shanty Town)’ by Desmond Dekker, who had one of the first reggae hits, in 1968, with the haunting Israelites. There’s Cliff’s previous hits ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’ and ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, and he sings the title track too. The deepest cut, though, might be Scotty’s ‘Draw Your Brakes’, a dub version of a 1967 rocksteady track. It’s cavernous, atmospheric, druggy and irresistible.

Reggae is mostly characterised as good-time music, but as Lester Bangs wrote in a 1976 piece, this belies the underlying violence. “Many of these records may be little more than a rhythm with a guitar chopping out two or three chords, no solos except a guy hollering things you can barely understand over the whole thing; but that rhythm is rock steady, the guitars chop to kill, and the singer is, often as not, describing class oppression or street war.” Keep this in mind and you’ll find Dekker singing “dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail” or even something as simple as Toots Hibbert accusingly going “It is youuuuuuu” assume a great urgency.

The Harder They Come isn’t a smooth film, but it doesn’t matter because it’s exhilarating. Henzell has an eye for striking images and the quicksilver editing feeds on the chaotic energy of the lead character. It’s on a short list of films—Black Orpheus and Buena Vista Social Club are two others—that introduced the world to an entire musical culture. While this is a wholly deserved reputation, it tends to underrate the effectiveness of the film itself. In moments like the ecstatic church scene with a few mischievous inserts of human desire, or the chase through the ghetto with a group of children cheering on a pistol-brandishing Ivan, The Harder They Come isn’t just a great reggae film but a great film, period.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Poacher: Review

The two most passionate members of the anti-poaching team in Richie Mehta’s new series have bird calls as their ringtones. With Mala (Nimisha Sajayan), a bird sanctuary official in Kerala, at least, it might be policy—natural sounds so as not to disturb nature. Alan (Roshan Mathew), though, is a computer engineer who moonlights as a snake doctor in Delhi. Yet, soft trills emanate from his phone too. 

The poachers carry their families into the jungle. One of them insists on taking along a photograph of his mother. Another’s actions are guided by the thought of his wife and son at home. Their brutal leader has his daughter’s smiling face pasted on the butt of his gun.   

It’s details like these that make Poacher such an engrossing series. Of the major showrunners in India’s first wave of streaming, Mehta is the most modest in his approach. Delhi Crime, which he created and directed the first season of, was a new kind of Hindi procedural: patient, sober, with dozens of characters across cascading plot lines. Poacher is in the same vein, methodical, trusting of its audience, a triumph for casting director Mukesh Chhabra.

Neel Banerjee (Dibyendu Bhattacharya), an ex-RAW agent, is tasked with bringing a gang of ivory traders down after the death of 18 elephants comes to light. He pulls Mala out from the bird sanctuary; she brings in Alan. Babu (Ankith Madhav), a forest official, and tough, resourceful SHO Dina (Kani Kusruti) complete the core group, though others pitch in as the series slaloms from the forests of Kerala to the streets of Delhi, where a gallery owner named Poonam Verma (Sapna Sand) is suspected to be a major trader of ivory. 

The scope of the investigation is laid out in granular detail in the first half of the series. This is where it's useful to have a director who works hard to vary setting, tone and technique so all that plot goes down a little easier (the dance bar opening to one of the episodes of Scam 1992 is a great example). The first four episodes of Poacher are a series of strategy meetings followed by raids and interrogations followed by more meetings and raids. It’s done with care and skill, and the performances carry even the most exposition-heavy scenes, but I found myself wishing for a little variation. 

Happily, the show switches gears in the fifth episode with a funny, revealing passage. Alan, who’s kept his family in the dark about his involvement in a frankly dangerous investigation, is on his way to a wedding with his wife and son. He receives a typically brusque call from Mala telling him to drop everything and join a raid. Instead of risking another argument with his wife—whom he’s just made up with the previous episode—Alan sneaks out of the venue, bribes the driver, see the raid through to completion, and rushes back. A welcome spotlight on the sheepish charm of Mathew, and much more interesting than the stereotype of the crimefighter putting their family life and mental and physical health at risk for the job (as Mala and Neel do).

The next episode is even better, splitting into two timelines, one following the poachers on their hunt, the other the forest officials visiting the site some months later. They’re led there by Aruku (Sooraj Pops), whose confession kicks off the series. Pops is superb as the conflicted centre of both expeditions, a sympathetic character even before an unnecessary revelation about his son. So is Vinu Verghese, who has a single memorable scene as a gunsmith who coolly trades barbs with his dangerous clients. Mehta showed a knack for deft character sketches in Delhi Crime, and Poacher is full of them—a lazy SHO who snaps to attention with a phone call from his bosses; two supremely confident getaway drivers in Delhi; Neel’s superior, played by Denzil Smith, calmly dispensing uncomfortable truths, one being that “sustaining the market at low levels”—pruning tusks for a little ivory—might actually save elephant lives. 

All this deftness goes out of the window when the show is in Delhi. It’s mystifying, given Mehta’s familiarity with the city and his perceptive, if pitiless, portrayal of it in Delhi Crime. Everyone peppers their speech with random bhenchods. When a police captain complains about feminism ruining everything, the show is practically begging you to compare the backward north Indian and the enlightened Malayalis sitting across the table. Alan and Mala are called ameerjaat (rich kids) and told to order or get lost, something a Delhi waiter at a roadside dhaba would only say if they had a deathwish.  

The depth of the cast allows for pleasing matchups: the soft and harsh tones of Mathew and Bhattacharya meshing; Amal Rajdev’s menacing Morris stared down by the equally formidable Kani Kusruti. There isn’t a lazy turn in the entire series, but Poacher nevertheless benefits from the forcefulness of Nimisha Sajayan in the lead. Sajayan is unlike any other Indian actress I know, incapable of making overtures to the camera, always getting to the point. No matter the film or the part, there’s a fierceness to her playing, reflected in her flashing eyes. She rages at everyone in Poacher—colleagues, superiors, bystanders, strangers. But there’s no affect to her anger. She just doesn't have time for your bullshit. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.