Shubhra Gupta

The choice of a working women’s hostel as the site of dread in this psychological horror show is a smart one: young women streaming in from small towns for jobs and freedom bring with them their histories, and when those unaddressed traumas and personal demons are unleashed, anything can happen. There’s power in ‘Khauf’s premise, and the initial episodes get busy introducing us to the characters we will meet in the eight-part series. Gwalior girl Madhu’s (Monika Panwar) arrival on the same floor on which live a handful of petrified women (Priyanka Setia, Chum Darang, Riya Shukla, Suchi Malhotra) serves as a catalyst for forward movement.

More than a hundred years after it occurred, the April 1919 massacre of Jallianwala Bagh is a wound that continues to fester. There has been no contestation about what happened that terrible day when General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire upon scores of unarmed innocents, many of them women and children, without a single warning. The people of Amritsar who had gathered there to protest against the Rowlatt Act had no inkling that a spotter plane had been deployed to ascertain their numbers: shortly afterwards it flew overhead, shoot-to-kill orders were barked, and ground was filled with the bodies of the dead and dying.

The question really is: Is the ‘dhai kilo ka haath’ still potent enough? And the answer to that, in this ultra-long, ultra-violent rant against India’s enemies, is a resounding yes. Sunny still has it. That is the end towards which the star lends his considerable heft, scything through endless rows of ‘gaddars’ and goons, who come at him pretty much though the entire nearly 160-minute duration of Jaat, so that he can smack ‘em down. Brigadier Baldev Pratap Singh aka Bulldozer uses all manner of weapons, from sophisticated bazookas with bullets long enough as his arms, to swords, sickles, and, when push comes to mighty shove, his bare hands, to keep them at bay, working his way to the chief antagonist Rana Thunga (Randeep Hooda) and the latter’s equally blood-thirsty brother (Vineet Kumar Singh). The only thing missing is the handpump.

The challenge is real. In almost every frame and sequence of this Eid release, Salman Khan aka Sanjay, the Raja of Rajkot, aka Sikandar, struggles to be present. You can see him go through the motions of emotion and action, delivering dialogue, dancing, romancing, shedding tears –yes, he’s man enough to cry– but nowhere do you see traces of the one and only Bhai, who has never pretended to be anything other than who he has been in the last thirty years– the star with his very specific style-and-swag– the blue bracelet and the bulked-up arms-and-torso akimbo adorning his favourite avatars of the loveable rascal-cum-the desi Robin Hood with the golden heart.

With the catchy title song going, ‘ek aur rang bhi dekhiye Bengal ka’, we are hopeful that this new Neeraj Pandey series, Khakee The Bengal Chapter, set in Calcutta/Kolkata, will actually be different. The eight-part show starts with a kidnapping gone wrong, and then the story begins unpacking its wares in right earnest: sloppy goons, sharp cops, a posse of politicians with murky underground connections, nefarious activities involving dead bodies and organ harvesting. A promising start quickly descends into predictability. The beats are familiar, the character types are even more so. Apart from the fact that the faces are mostly Bengali actors — some familiar, some not so — Khakee The Bengal Chapter comes off as same old. And that’s too bad, because the ensemble comprises some of the most popular actors working in Bengali, starting with top stars Prosenjit Chatterjee, Parambrata Chattopadhyay, and Jeet, amongst others.

Ooty-based schoolgirl Dhara (Inayat Verma) is happiest when dancing. Single parent Shiv (Abhishek Bachchan) loves her to bits, but is not mad about her wanting to go off to Mumbai to focus on her moves, even when well-known dancer-teacher (Nora Fatehi) dangles an inducement to attend her sought-after academy. Things start falling into place, and then one day, trouble strikes. Can sheer will and determination win the day? Can dreams really come true?

Based on a true story, The Diplomat is about an Indian woman lured into a false marriage with a Pakistani man, and how her life spirals into a nightmare. The backdrop of terrorism-and-espionage is, by now, very much a John Abraham zone, and here he plays JP Singh, the diplomat who moves from suspicion-to-support when the terrified Uzma Ahmed (Sadia Khateeb) seeks refuge within the Indian embassy in Islamabad.

A stolen motorcycle– ‘dupahiya’– in the fictional village of Dhadakpur becomes the fulcrum around which this new comedy and its characters revolve, delivering a melange of Bihari-via-Mumbai accents, loads of quirk and broad life lessons. This is the mix that gave ‘Panchayat’ its mojo, with Phulera’s Sachivji and Pradhanji and their cohorts becoming a byword in the madly-popular OTT-specific ruralcom genre. Here, Uttar Pradesh is replaced by Bihar, but the mood remains similarly overall sunny, as the occasional clouds created by the busy plot (written by Avinash Dwivedi and Chirag Garg) are dispelled by the show’s determinedly cheerful air: leave the viewer smiling is clearly the mandate.