Kahaani 9 Years Later: Was It Any Good?
By: Ankur J. Das
Tags: Bollywood, Cinema, Mystery, Thriller, Review

Why am I really reviewing a near-decade old movie with relatively lesser mass appeal?

Well, it’s because the trailer for “Bob Biswas” is out and I’m hyped to go see it. For those who don’t remember, let’s just say he was an interesting character who showed up in Kahaani. With Dabangg sequels, the Singham movies, and Satyameva Jayate 2, it looks like Bollywood might be giving us yet another cinematic universe here. Well sign me the fuck up.

But there’s one problem: when I watched Kahaani, my brain had not yet developed object permanence. So I have no recollection of the story, except for….well, Vidya Balan’s belly bump.

The only logical thing for me to do on a Sunday evening, therefore, is to search for it on Netflix. Netflix has this feature where it finishes a movie’s name for you and then reveals that the movie isn’t on Netflix. Perfect cockblocker.

But this time, this feature malfunctioned. Kahaani was actually on the platform. 2 hours after I hit the play button, I already knew I had to write this.

Alright, I’m kidding. I’m reviewing this because of just how fucking badass Vidya Balan is in the movie.

So, if you’re like me and you had no concept of reality back in 2012, you might want to stop reading. Take your time and watch the movie and come back. Or don’t.

A Synopsis

The film opens with a poison-gas leak inside a Kolkata metro train. This ends up killing hundreds. 2 years later, not Bidya Bagchi comes to Kolkata to file a missing-persons’ complaint for her missing husband. She is a part-time hacker and full-time pregnant.

As she goes about finding the secrets about her husband, she gets to learn about the mysterious city of Gotham, I mean, Kolkata. She starts to harden up and becomes an absolute ass-kicker by the end. The movie ends with umm…. an epilogue…. which is pretty bad. We’ll get into it all.

Here’s me dissecting the good and bad aspects of this decade-old mystery thriller so that you can distract yourself from the harsh realities outside your screen.

The Good

The Ambition

Look, I have to give credit where credit is due. This movie was made in 20-fucking-12. It is UNBELIEVABLE just how ambitious this project is. An all-star cast, a gritty ass story, a pregnant lead. Hell, this doesn’t even sound like a Bollywood movie to be honest.

Do I love it? Absolutely not. Do I think it was a giant leap for Bollywood? Far from it. But was it the start of something? YES.

Source: hungama.com

Kahaani was a very refreshing story. A woman who is trying to seek vengeance in a city more crowded than an ant colony while she dribbles with the police? And that woman is Vidya Balan? Yessir.

Sujoy Ghosh is the director and this movie genuinely made me want to dive deeper into this man’s legacy. For I believe this person may have dropped some underappreciated bangers while I was getting my first voice cracks.

The Videography

I don’t know if many people even wonder about the behind the scenes efforts while consuming art. I don’t really know why I care, to be frank. But boy oh boy is the camera work excellent in this movie.

The camera work isn’t used just to add or withdraw tension from a scene. Close-up shots are more stressful than wide angles, yeah we get it. But the way things just haze out and pace up from time-to-time really matches the contexts it is used in. The videography is used less as a constructive medium and more as a tool to tell the story here, and I absolutely love that.

Bob Biswas

You knew I was gonna talk about this. Bob Biswas has to be in the list of the most menacing characters in Bollywood. This man looks like a stereotypical nerd kid who would get bullied by dudes like Kabir Singh. But simultaneously, he is a cold-hearted killer. And he says “Nomoshkar” before unifying your eyebrows with a bullet.

Bob exhibits strange under-developed brained behaviour and simultaneously knows how to get away with murder. Saswata Chatterjee is a veteran actor from the Bengali film industry and you can totally see why. From ticks on his face to his slightly disoriented running, everything about this character is irksome.

I want to believe that Abhishek Bacchan will be able to do this character justice in the spin-off.

Nawazuddin Siddique

Do I even need to say more?

Siddique plays Khan, a chain-smoking asshole senior officer from the Intelligence Bureau and kills it. Given that Siddique was still a name that not many were familiar with, it is simply humbling to watch this person exuding sheer confidence and skill.

Khan’s character is actually written as a Devil’s advocate. He was meant to blur the lines between right and wrong and he pulled it off like Bhai pulls his Rupa Frontline off. Ok I promise I’m done with these jokes.

In fact, Siddique played the role so well that even I started hating his holier-than-thou attitude at points, knowing fully well it’s a fictional character. That’s a performance you can’t fake.

Social Commentaries

The movie actually tries to be an allegory for women empowerment. It brings up Durga Maa as a cornerstone of purity and draws parallels between her and our female lead. Whether or not it succeeds to do so, I’ll discuss later. But here’s something that the movie absolutely nails: commenting on the shifting nature of morality.

So there’s this mystery guy in the movie, alright? Goes by Milan Damji. He used to be with the law and got sold to some terrorists, because corruption. So, the cops are after him. Siddique’s character decides to do something rather unethical to catch Damji and is asked “How are we any different from him then?”

And I kid you not, Khan says, “We are not.”

The lines between what’s right and what’s wrong are VERY muddy in this film and that is what makes it an interesting watch. Speaking of “watch”-

Pacing

I was somewhat hesitant going into this movie when I saw its 2hr+ runtime. But the pacing is so well-maintained throughout the movie that you would never want to glance at your clock, or “watch”. Que laughter track.

Every five or ten minutes, there is something or the other that is happening that solves the mystery a little bit. This keeps the movie engaging and completing it does not feel like a task. Pacing is something that I feel like a lot of writers all over could improve but this movie really stood out. This was because it was telling you a story so grandiose that if it were conceived today, it would have been a Netflix series with 4 seasons and Radhika Apte.

The Lead’s Character Arc

Vidya Bagchi starts out as a helpless woman in the city of Kolkata. She seems fragile yet reckless. But as the story advances and her husband’s connections with terrorism and the 2 year-old poison tragedy unfolds, she is hardened by this harsh realities surrounding her.

By the end, we see a Walter White-like transformation in Vidya where she isn’t hesitating to pull a trigger anymore.

I love this. Or should I say I loved it until the epilogue. Which beautifully brings me to the bad.

The bad:

The Lead’s Character Arc

Wait what? Ankur, didn’t you say you liked the lead character’s arc?

Why yes, of course I did. I did like the lead’s character arc. Until the epilogue.

You see, in the epilogue it is revealed that Vidya was actually playing everyone else in the story. She was doing this to bring the actual person responsible for her husband’s demise to justice. Turns out she wasn’t actually pregnant. Turns out she actually had the support of an ex-Intelligence Bureau officer. Turns out she has a hair clip that can conveniently pick any lock in the entirety of kolkata. Turns out she knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who may conveniently provide information about her husband’s killer’s whereabouts. Turns out every alley in Kolkata houses someone or the other who has information about national threats lurking among us.

Just fuck off already.

I’m especially upset about this because the character development that I thought she underwent due to her time in Kolkata was a lie. Do you see just how much better and real the movie could’ve got by, I don’t know, just AVOIDING THIS REVEAL.

Because it is revealed that our protagonist was always 8 steps ahead of everyone, it feels like I’m watching a superhero movie without knowing how they actually became a superhero. This is like watching Peter Parker kick green butt with only a 5 minute explanation about how he got his powers in the Sam Raimi movie. Hell, the twists of this movie actually remind me of a Rick & Morty episode that was parodying the ‘Heist Movie Trope’.

Kahaani feels like the sequel to a story that was never established to begin with.

The Epilogue

This goes hand in hand with the previous section. You know how this could’ve been improved? By cutting this segment out of the fucking movie. Imagine how goddamn jaw-dropping the ending would’ve been if it didn’t explain who Vidya was. If it didn’t reveal that she wasn’t pregnant. If it didn’t spoon-feed the audience about her obsessive cleaning habits to not leave her fingerprints. An open ended ending for Kahaani is all I ask for. That would’ve become Christopher Nolan’s boner jam for Christ’s sake.

To top this part of the script, we have Amitabh Bacchan making allusions between Durga and Vidya Bagchi. This is simply ignorant and dare I say forced.

There are highly feminist undertones throughout this story that tries to show that women are capable of anything as long as they have the necessary skill. But it all falls short. Because what the movie doesn’t realize is that Vidya Bagchi is not a feminist role model. In fact, she is hardly a person you should want to invite to your home. Which brings me to her character.

Vidya Balan, I mean, Bagchi

I know this is one of Vidya Balan’s most critically acclaimed roles in forever. I know this is something that desi cinephiles like to call the epitome of good character writing. But trust me when I say this, Vidya’s character is a catastrophic mess.

All the other characters in the movie are individuals with their own personalities. They feel like standalone characters and feel real. They are unique.

But for whatever reason, Vidya’s quirks just seem to be all over the place. She goes from a more family friendly Harley Quinn to every kid’s best friend aunt to Enola Holmes to Hackerwoman in seconds. All because the script needs her to. This is a recurring flaw in the movie. The world painted by the script doesn’t really have any strong rules. Events just sort of happen. Because the script said so.

By the end of the movie, I was genuinely left wondering, which of these personas was the actual Vidya?

Her performance is confusing and feels like she was playing 5 different characters at the same time. And I do not criticize Vidya Balan’s acting for it. I think she did the best she could with the script. This was especially hard for me to admit because I actually appreciated her development, just not her quirks. And jesus fucking christ what are these crying shots?

And did I mention her futile character arc?

Has her character fallen so far down the rabbit hole of trauma that she is adopting these personas to cope with the reality of not having any real human connection left?

Or was the writing utterly inconsistent and an attempt to create a desi Captain Marvel? You decide.

Kolkata: You sexy

Woah, those are not my words! That’s straight out of the movie’s album.

Do you hate clinginess? If so, be prepared for a cringe-fest as Kahaani shows you just how clingy it is to Kolkata. From the get-go, the movie is actually so obsessed with trying to paint a Kolkata that is alive and interesting, that instead of it serving as the backdrop for an interesting Kahaani, it BECOMES A CHARACTER.

I don’t know about you, but that only works when we are in places like Asgard, or Gotham, or whatever.

This attempt to shove so much fucking Kolkata down the viewers’ throats actually feels more like propaganda and less like entertainment. I went to Kolkata recently and I was fairly unfazed. Don’t get me wrong, Kolkata is all chill. It’s a giant ass city that intimidates me. But if Kahaani were a meal, I would have liked a little less Kolkata in it.

Screenplay

It’s bad. Plain and simple. It is bad and HAS NOT aged well. AT ALL. Nu-uh.

So much cringe-worthy dialogue in this movie that I actually gave a disappointed face to my walls from time to time. Especially Vidya Balan’s. But then I have to take into consideration that it WAS in fact made a decade back. Lines like “Ladkiyon ki tarah ro kyu rahe ho?” and “Tune mujhe didi bulaya? Toh mai teri elder sister hui na? Now, give me a high five.” certainly is the recipe for a little too much cringe for my fragile heart.

A huge chunk of the story’s events boil down to pure coincidence. And a wise man once said, “If a movie relies too much on coincidence, you should probably watch ‘Travis Scott’s Apologises for 1 Hour’ on YouTube instead.”

Final Thoughts

Kahaani is a flawed step towards a Bollywood that doesn’t demand the same cookie-cutter, hollow movies that have the personality of a table. It is unique in its portrayal of women but definitely overdoes by telling the audience exactly what to think. And I can’t even blame it for doing that. I’m both glad that this movie exists and frustrated that it isn’t as good as it could’ve been. Thassit, cya.

If you liked reading it, share it with your MOM because she’s probably the only one who remembers watching this relic of a movie. Leave a comment. It does nothing for the algorithm, I just like to know who read my stuff, and what went wrong with them to read a 2455 word article about a movie.

PS: While I was writing this review, I realized that there is a Kahaani 2 that was released 5 years ago. Apparently it has nothing to do with the original version. Yet another missed opportunity to expand on Vidya Bagchi’s character.