OTTplay Reviews Blind, Neeyat, Adhura & More

Blind: An Assured Sonam Kapoor Headlines An Ineffective Thriller

This is #CriticalMargin, where Ishita Sengupta gets contemplative over new Hindi films and shows.

Dir: Shome Makhija

Cast: Sonam Kapoor Ahuja

WITH Shome Makhija’s Blind, Sonam Kapoor Ahuja headlines a full-length Hindi film after four years. The good news is the actor gives an assured turn as a woman who loses her eyesight in an accident and yet is afflicted with guilt over something else. The bad news is the outing unfolds as a strangely dormant affair that barters complexities for archetypes.

Gia Singh (Ahuja) and her brother Adrian (Danesh Razvi) have grown up in an orphanage at Glasgow. They are not related by blood but feelings. When the film opens, she is informed by her mother, the caretaker of the orphanage (Lillete Dubey) that Adrian is at a music concert. This is a problem because he needs to study. Gia, a police officer by profession, drags her unwilling brother from the pub. Midway, while they get into a scuffle, the car meets with an accident. Blood leaks from Gia’s eyes while Adrian lies dead.

Blind is an adaptation of the 2011 South Korean film of the same name. The Hindi retelling, much like the original, is a thriller centred on a serial killer on the loose who abducts and tortures women. The universal undertones of such a premise ensures it travels fast, despite cultural changes. After the accident, Gia loses her job and she is left subsumed in guilt. She lives in a sparse apartment with a dog as a companion. One day as she waits for a cab, a car stops before her offering a lift. While in it, she realises the driver is an Indian, wears a specific perfume she is familiar with. He offers her water, and she thanks him. And then, Gia feels a thud in the boot of the car as if someone has been entrapped. As she queries, he flees. The Driver (Purab Kohli) is the serial killer.

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Past Lives: An Ode To All The Lives We'll Never Live

AT the heart of Celine Song’s Past Lives is the Korean idea of in-yeon: a karmic connection that lets people cross each other’s paths over and over again, across several lifetimes. An inadequate translation would be fate. If two neighbours brush past each other in a narrow alley (like in a Wong Kar-wai movie) or if two strangers meet aboard a train and spend the night falling in love (like in a Richard Linklater movie), in-yeon suggests it is a culmination of interactions over thousands of years. The idea isn’t exclusively romantic. Every person we come across is said to be someone we have interacted with in a past life. In Past Lives, in-yeon brings together childhood sweethearts Nora and Hae Sung only for destiny to pull them apart. This is a love story of what-ifs.

— PRAHLAD SRIHARI

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Playing in: Theatres

Neeyat: Indian 'Glass Onion' Can't Sustain Its Suspense

A BILLIONAIRE invites his closest friends to celebrate his birthday. He has chosen the place and the rules. They arrive at his opulent palace, armed with phones but no signal. Everyone settles in, and then someone new joins the party. No one knows them, save the host. Midway through the revelry, one of them dies. Secrets spill like blood. Everyone appears to have a motive. The plot thickens as the newest entrant narrows down the killer. This could very well be the description of Rian Johnson’s 2022 pulpy murder mystery Glass Onion, the second film in his Knives Out series. But this, in fact, is the premise of Anu Menon’s new outing, Neeyat, a whodunnit that unfolds with competence and intrigue till it circumvents logic and settles for contrived resolution.

— I.S.

Playing in: Theatres

Adhura: Half-Baked Horror Saga Is No School Of Lies

BAD SHOWS, I have figured, do more than just evoke anger. They force us to question our decision-making skills (“Of all the things we could have watched, we chose this?”); they compel us to question our existence (“Given that we will die one day, is this how we choose to spend our limited time?”). And they nudge us to appreciate good work by highlighting its rarity. While watching Adhura, the new show streaming on Amazon Prime, I went through all the three stages and felt profusely grateful to filmmaker Avinash Arun for School of Lies. Adhura is what happens when a child accidentally watches School of Lies, misses two episodes and then relays it to their friends, mistaking world-building for mist-covered hill stations.

— I.S.

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Stream on: Prime Video

Tarla: A Bland Offering That Fritters Its Prime Ingredient

PIYUSH GUPTA’s Tarla opens with a really vacuous voiceover. The story, a man informs us, is not about Tarla Dalal, the amateur chef who became a culinary giant and transformed home cooking. Instead, it is about a time when Tarla and other other women like her wanted to do something in their lives. Objectively and subjectively, it means nothing. No biopic, however narrow in ambition, can be comprehended in isolation. This is the film stating the obvious, egging us on to view it as a depiction of a person and not an analysis of a persona. But Gupta’s outing is so basic in every way possible, so bereft of inspiration that it unfolds as neither, doing grave injustice to the trailblazing woman at the center.

— I.S.

Stream on: ZEE5

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