Read our critics' takes on The Indrani Mukerjea Story, Zone Of Interest, Laapataa Ladies & more
In The Zone Of Interest, Evil Is Mundane — & All The More Horrifying For It |
The horrors of the Holocaust are invisible yet omnipresent in The Zone of Interest. The film dares to draw its power from what’s left out rather than put in, writes Prahlad Srihari |
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THE ZONE OF INTEREST is, by design, two films playing out side by side. There is the film we are shown and there is the film we are made to imagine. The former opens on a pastoral fantasy: a husband and wife picnic on a meadow by a river with their five children; they bask in the sun, splash around in the water and pick berries before driving home to their beautiful villa and their flourishing lives of birthdays, anniversaries and promotions. The latter takes shape in our mind’s eye through the sounds we hear: the scattered bursts of gunfire, the spine-chilling cries of agony, the huffs, hisses and howls of trains arriving are punctuated by a low thrum of industrial machinery. (Stream top-rated movies and shows across platforms and languages, using the OTTplay Premium Jhakaas pack, for just Rs 199/month.) Malice stains the air with a foul stench that gets under the skin. It is enough to make us feel sick in the stomach. As to the source, two and two can be put together once background details come into view. There is the smoke billowing from chimneys. There is the watchtower peeking from above barbed wire-crowned walls. And there is the blood being washed off a pair of boots. Next door to the beautiful villa is the Auschwitz concentration camp where a million people were killed during WWII. Picnicking and swimming and living it up is the family of the camp commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller). |
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The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth | Netflix Docu's Quest Is Skin Deep At Best |
THE FALLACY OF The Indrani Mukerjea Story: Buried Truth, the documentary on the former media tycoon accused of allegedly killing her daughter Sheena Bora, is pretty straightforward. Directed by Uraaz Bahl and Shaana Levy, the outing is too preoccupied with regurgitating facts that already exist in the public domain to inhabit a distinct perspective. The non-fiction work is too concerned with mining the sensationalism of the case and blindly featuring the media circus around it, to take a moment and reflect on it with the afforded hindsight. — ISHITA SENGUPTA |
| Laapataa Ladies Is A Biting Feminist Satire About The Lost & The Found |
KIRAN RAO’s Laapataa Ladies is a glorious instance of lost and found. Not least because the premise centres on two newly-wed brides who get lost in the maze of mistaken identities only to be eventually found. It is because the film, charming and endearing in equal measure, feels too on the nose for a while till it finds its way and culminates in a moving finale. Rao's sophomore feature is a captivating example of assured writing and winning performances that rise above moments imbued with such literal messaging that a lesser film would have capsized. — I.S. |
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| Spaceman: Sci-fi Drama Is Too Lyrical For Its Own Good |
JOHAN RENCK’s Spaceman has so much going for it. It stars Adam Sandler in all his dramatic splendour. The sci-fi story revolves around a lonely Czech cosmonaut on a long solo mission to investigate a mysterious purple cloud at the edge of the solar system — while his pregnant wife back on Earth is readying to leave him. It’s a ‘space movie’ about reflection, isolation, existentialism and a bit of grief, and it also features a nosy and chatty spider-like creature. There’s a swelling symphony of a soundtrack. Not to mention the luminous Carey Mulligan, once again lighting up a dysfunctional marital drama as a disgruntled partner of a tortured man. It also has Isabella Rossellini as a controlling commanding officer who refuses to pass on the wife’s break-up messages to her cosmonaut. The palette of the film is very Terrence Mallick-esque — a tone poem of sorts, with lots of whispery and hallucinatory dialogue, introspective memory montages and lens flares, profound ideas about beginnings and the meaning of life and love. — RAHUL DESAI |
| Fairly Folk: A Wonderfully Weird Film On Marriage | IN Karan Gour’s Fairy Folk, solutions arrive out of nowhere. When a married couple’s car breaks down in the middle of a forest, they encounter a strange, mythical being. The people in question, Mohit and Ritika (Mukul Chadda and Rasika Dugal — both terrific and fearful in how terrific they are), are scared out of their wits but when they make a dash for home, the creature, a literal fairy folk, follows them too. This sudden disturbance transforms into a timely intervention as the new entrant catalyses a tale of belated desire and potential promise. Gour takes this playful premise and layers it with magic realism, crafting in the process astute observations about life, gender politics and love. On paper it might seem like a tall task but Fairy Folk unfolds as an instance of assured filmmaking where the subtext never overwhelms the context. It is an experimental outing that remains attuned to the demands of relationships and the pitfalls of marriage, and during its runtime, lays everything bare without sharpening its gaze for a stringent critique. — I.S. |
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