Arnab Banerjee

Set in a picturesque yet increasingly desolate hamlet in Uttarakhand’s Kumaon region, Vinod Kapri’s Pyre is a quietly devastating meditation on old age, abandonment, loneliness and the inexorable erosion of rural life. The two-hour Hindi-language film centres on Tulsi (Hira Devi) and Padam (Padam Singh), an elderly goat-herding couple who have been married for over six decades. Their only son, Harish, migrated to Mumbai many years ago and has never returned. As their neighbours gradually desert their crumbling ancestral homes, the couple find themselves among the last remaining inhabitants of what is fast becoming a ghost village.

The enduring conflicts between India and Pakistan have spawned countless narratives, alternately celebrated, romanticised and vilified on either side of the border, depending on the prevailing political climate. These stories are often fuelled by hostility and nationalist fervour, yet paradoxically accommodate moments of affection, shared sentiment and enduring human connection. For unimaginative screenwriters, few subjects offer such an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of dramatic possibilities as the fraught relationship between these neighbouring nations. Divided by history, politics and ideology, India and Pakistan nevertheless remain bound by a shared cultural inheritance, their destinies intertwined in ways that transcend the animosities separating them.

Obsessive love, with its unsettling mix of desire, delusion, and possessiveness, has long provided fertile ground for cinema. The idea of a man consumed by an all-encompassing fixation on a woman, and the havoc such an obsession wreaks on her life, can make for a compelling psychological thriller. But obsession, however disturbing or intense, cannot by itself sustain a two-hour film. Without a credible storyline, a tightly constructed screenplay and characters who behave in ways that make psychological sense, even the most intriguing premise risks becoming an exercise in narrative excess. Karan Rawal’s Tu Hai Meri Kiran, now in cinemas, borrows its title from the song of the same name in Yash Chopra’s Darr (1993), the blockbuster that turned a deranged stalker’s obsessive pursuit of a woman into one of Hindi cinema’s most memorable explorations of pathological love. Rawal’s film attempts to give this familiar theme an inventive twist by introducing a science-fiction element: a mysterious telephone connection between two people living a decade apart. Unfortunately, what promises to be an absorbing psychological thriller never quite manages to get off the ground.

Truth is what we ostensibly fight for, yet it is often the first casualty of the very battles waged in its name. Nowhere is this paradox more acutely felt than in a courtroom, where the clamour for retribution must yield to the rigours of evidence and the dispassionate demands of the law. It is this uneasy intersection of public outrage, legal obligation and the pursuit of justice that lends Prahaar: The Untold Story of Ujjwal Nikam its most compelling premise. Unfortunately, a film that understands the moral stakes of its subject does not always possess the dramatic finesse to do it justice. Directed by Avinash Arun and produced by Dinesh Vijan under the Maddock Films banner, Prahaar traces the professional journey of public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam through some of India’s most consequential criminal proceedings. Revisiting the legal battles arising from the 1993 Bombay bombings and the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, the film eventually settles on the trial of Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving terrorist captured during the 26/11 carnage. Rather than merely reconstruct the horrors of that night, it turns its gaze towards the protracted judicial proceedings that followed, examining what it means to uphold the rule of law when public sentiment clamours for swift and uncompromising vengeance.

Ajay Devgn returns as Vijay Salgaonkar in Drishyam: The Conclusion, the third and final chapter of the Hindi-language Drishyam franchise, directed by Abhishek Pathak. Tabu, Shriya Saran, Ishita Dutta and Rajat Kapoor reprise their roles, while Jaideep Ahlawat and Prakash Raj join the ensemble as the story moves towards its promised denouement. The franchise has always revolved around a deceptively unsettling question: if a lie is constructed convincingly enough, can it eventually become indistinguishable from truth? The concluding chapter now has the unenviable task of giving that question a final dramatic meaning.

A film may possess an ingenious premise, an assured director and a cast brimming with talent, yet still lack the one intangible quality that can make or break a genre exercise: the right vibe. Not vibe in its loose, fashionable sense, but the precise tonal alchemy of mood, rhythm, atmosphere and attitude that tells us how seriously—or how gleefully—we are expected to take what unfolds on screen. For an action-comedy, that equilibrium is particularly precarious. Too much solemnity makes the jokes feel intrusive; too much frivolity diminishes the stakes. Vibe, for the most part, negotiates this tonal tightrope with considerable assurance.

Do the ends ever truly justify the means? Can justice be meted out by those sworn merely to enforce the law? When two starkly contrasting police officers are drawn into the investigation of a young girl’s brutal disappearance and murder, these questions—among several others—confront the edifice of law with unsettlingly plausible answers. Meghna Gulzar’s latest offering, Daayra, starring Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran as the two investigating officers, reopens an age-old debate: the tension between law and morality, between justice and vengeance. The narrative unfolds against a harrowing crime scene, framed by a mother’s desperate plea for justice.

Some thrillers are so absorbing that they persuade us to surrender logic at the door and simply follow the action wherever it takes us. A good mystery, particularly one built around a cat-and-mouse chase, can make even the most improbable turn feel plausible because the characters, the atmosphere, and the suspense are persuasive enough to keep disbelief suspended. Haiwaan begins with precisely that promise — a potentially engrossing tale of guilt, vengeance, betrayal, and retribution, populated by characters whose secrets could have sustained a gripping psychological thriller. Instead, Priyadarshan’s remake of his own 2016 Malayalam film Oppam gradually loses sight of the thriller it could have been, drowning a promising premise in star power, implausible action, and a screenplay that repeatedly mistakes excess for excitement.