Readers Write In #772: My Favourite Hindi Films of 2024

By Abhirup Mascharak

Merry Christmas

Sriram Raghavan has never made a film I disliked, and Merry Christmas, to my great joy, leaves that record unbroken. It contains the usual pleasures of a Raghavan film, such as his giddy littering of Easter eggs (the references range from Shakti Samanta to Raymond Chandler, Ernst Lubitsch to Rajesh Khanna, Pinocchio to Parinda), delectable black comedy (like the smash cut between a character saying “You’re killing me” to her being killed), and smart detailing (such as the use of origami swans as a leitmotif). And since he has, more than any other Hindi film director before or since Vijay Anand, embraced the thriller genre, Merry Christmas contains a murder mystery that is satisfyingly resolved. But unlike Raghavan’s previous films, this one is also a love story. Indeed, as you see the protagonists Albert and Maria, played by an excellent-as-usual Vijay Sethupathi and a better-than-usual Katrina Kaif, meet, talk, walk and swap stories for the first forty minutes or so, you wonder if you are in for a desi version of Before Sunrise. But since these are two people who – as we gradually learn and as is typical of noir tales – have been scarred by the vagaries of life and who have done things that put them on the wrong side of law, Merry Christmas becomes that rare beast: an experimental mainstream film, one that asks if a Linklater-like story of strangers meeting and falling in love can be wedded to a tale of ordinary people sucked or forced into committing a crime à la many a David Goodis novel. With Raghavan at the helm, the answer, for me, is a resounding yes. The writing convincingly establishes Albert and Maria as kindred spirits, lonely and desperate and romantic all at once, who needed only to cross paths to realize they are made for each other. So, when they slowly yet surely fall in love even as they navigate each other’s dark secrets, womanizing creeps and clever cops, it never seems incongruous. And the climax, which reaches a crescendo in terms of maintaining this deft blend of suspense and romance, bestows upon the couple what the titular festival is all about – redemption. 

Madgaon Express

A film on three male friends who embark upon a trip to Goa is bound to remind Indian viewers of Dil Chahta Hai, to which Madgaon Express dutifully doffs the hat early on. But its DNA is really that of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, not only in terms of plot (like the Guy Ritchie film, this one also chronicles the none-too-wise shenanigans of childhood friends that lead them into the clutches of ruthless gangsters) but also in terms of sensibility (like Ritchie, debutant director Kunal Khemu aims to juxtapose laughter and violence, exemplified in a hilarious yet gory spoof of a famous scene from The Godfather). There is also a bit of The Hangover. Much as Stu, the most mild-mannered among the quartet of friends in that film, morphs into a reckless rowdy when drugged, Pratik, the hypochondriac mama’s boy of the central trio in Madgaon Express, turns into a daredevil when cocaine enters his system. Pratik Gandhi has a lot of fun with the Jekyll-and-Hyde sides of this character. But it is Divyenndu, playing Dhanush aka Dodo, who really steals the show. His interactions with Pratik and Ayush (the third friend, played by Avinash Tiwary) are tinged with a poignancy I did not expect to find in a film like this. Dodo is that one guy almost every friend circle has – the underachiever, the one who is left behind, the one who feels torn between the urge to reconnect with his pals and the need to hide from them the fact that he is less successful than them. Because this is a comedy, Dodo’s attempts to hide his humble life from his more thriving buddies are frequently milked for laughs, but through it all Divyenndu never lets you lose sight of the sadder side of the character: a man who feels diminished in the presence of the very guys he loves, and who, possibly, wishes that they were all still in school or college rather than the big bad world beyond the campuses. In fact, one of the chief strengths of the film is that it concentrates on the relationship between the three friends rather than veer off into romantic tracks the way Dil Chahta Hai or Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara did. It’s their bonding which builds between the film and the viewers the emotional connection. Coupled with the madcap characters and situations that come with the friendship drama – an all-women smuggling gang, rival mobsters who were once married, a bout of cross-dressing, Mexican standoffs inside a train – the film keeps you entertained throughout. The ending promises a sequel set in Las Vegas, the backdrop for The Hangover. Make it already. 

Kill

Kill is made with the lean, mean ferocity of the John Wick films. The Keanu Reeves franchise gives Wick only the barebones of a backstory before plunging him, and us, into gruelling and consistently thrilling fight scenes that come in rapid succession. Kill, likewise, gives NSG commandos Amrit and Viresh a nominal excuse to board a train that a bunch of dacoits (led by a father-son duo whom Ashish Vidyarthi and Raghav Juyal play with aplomb) want to loot, and then comes up with one dynamic, fantastically choreographed action scene after another as the heroes battle the villains. The director, Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, deserves kudos for his steadfast focus on the action. There are no songs, no comedy tracks, and despite the presence of a love interest for Amrit, almost no romance. Helped by the editing of Shivkumar Panicker, Bhat keeps the proceedings mostly free of flab, and with action director Sea-Yuong Oh, who had earlier worked on the similarly train-set Snowpiercer, managing the fisticuff scenes, the film gives lovers of action cinema everything they want. Well, except for a more charismatic leading man. Lakshya Lalwani, as Amrit, is not bad, but his conventionally pretty-boy persona is a misfit in a film like this, which would have benefitted from someone with a more rugged presence. And if you really want to nitpick, there’s an incongruity or two in the plot. But the film delivers where it matters: the fight sequences. There’s a brutal poetry of motion in the way kicks and punches are thrown in the film, and Amrit and Viresh devise some really inventive ways to get rid of the baddies. Since all of this happens on the train, the confined space lends to the proceedings an urgency, a claustrophobic feel that only enhances the thrill quotient. Genre films do not get any purer than this.

Chandu Champion

There is not one sports film cliché you won’t find in Chandu Champion. The underdog protagonist, the gruff coach, the initial setbacks, the training montages, the climactic victory – it’s all there. And yet, the film is never less than involving, and often quite moving, because the makers introduce some necessary ingredients into the overfamiliar template. First, the film tells the story of a man whom most of us had never heard of before. Murlikant Petkar was a war hero and India’s first winner of an individual gold medal at the Olympics. Why isn’t he, then, a household name in our country? Is it because of our indifference to any sport that is not cricket? Or is it because Petkar won the medal in Paralympics, which, as he bitterly remarks in one scene, is not considered ‘regular’ Olympics, for acknowledging the disabled as regular, let alone remarkable, people would contradict the tendency to treat them with pity alone? But while the obscurity to which Petkar was relegated is deeply unfortunate, it helps the film, since our lack of knowledge regarding Petkar is one reason we keep watching, eager to know how his life plays out. Secondly, the film is well-written. I liked how things come full circle in the screenplay, like Petkar’s childhood hero Dara Singh being used as a means to motivate him as an adult, even as Petkar quits wrestling for other sports, or how his swim across a river in an early scene anticipates his triumphs in the swimming pool. I liked how the film, while never taking anything away from Petkar, acknowledges the role chance plays in his life; without the blessings of Fate, nobody survives murderous bullies, debilitating war injuries and a suicide attempt. I liked the small touches, such as Petkar learning to crack a smile during one of the most trying periods of his life. And I liked many of the dialogues, be it Petkar’s aforementioned tirade against ableism, his coach’s remark on getting second chances, and the same coach’s motivational speech to Petkar. Thirdly, there’s the cast. Kartik Aaryan inhabits the role of Petkar with a unforced ease that masks how demanding a role this actually is. The proclivity of some viewers to deride this actor notwithstanding, he keeps improving with every film, and this is possibly his best work till date. He is surrounded by some splendid actors that play the many loving chaperones Petkar has: much as Pip in Great Expectations, for all his obsession with Estella, is really nurtured and aided and shaped by a slew of good men (Joe, Magwitch, Herbert, Wemmick), so is Petkar blessed with a friend (Bhuvan Arora), an army officer (Yashpal Sharma), the coach (Vijay Raaz), and a hospital orderly (Rajpal Yadav), among others. Undertaking the journey of Petkar’s life with them is such a rewarding experience that I could gladly overlook the glitches, such as some needless comedy here and there, and the awkward framing device of Petkar narrating his story to skeptical cops. “Hasta kaheko hain?” Petkar angrily asks anyone who mocks his ambitions. Well, forgive me, Mr Petkar, but I was grinning ear-to-ear by the end of the film.

Agni

Rahul Dholakia’s last film, Raees, was misguided both tonally (stuck between being a Deewaar-like emotional look into what turns a man towards crime and an amoral gangster film along the lines of Goodfellas) and morally (in its efforts to make a hero out of somebody who is, frankly, a vile criminal). Perhaps this was the outcome of the casting: when you choose a star to play a protagonist who is modelled on a real-life criminal, even the worst things the protagonist does must be depicted with a degree of he’s-not-really-a-bad-guy hand-wringing, for our stars are rarely comfortable with portraying amorality, let alone immorality, on screen. Since there are no star egos to massage in Agni, there is no such dissonance here. Pratik Gandhi, who had quite a run in 2024 with Madgaon Express, this and Do aur Do Pyaar (which didn’t quite click for me, but he was very good in it), is allowed to be heroic and vulnerable as Vitthalrao Surve, the firefighter protagonist. Yes, he rescues many people trapped in burning buildings in some superbly staged sequences. But the screenplay, and Gandhi’s stellar performance, keep Surve determinedly life-sized. For all his daring, he is still the middle-class man who feels uneasy at lavish parties, the public servant whom ministers shush at every turn, the man in uniform who is viewed as the poor cousin to the other stripe of uniformed men (that is, policemen), and the father who struggles to command respect from his son. Watch him in the scene where he vents against the municipal irregularities and lack of civil sense among people that let fires break out, and you realize how much of an unequal battle people like Surve have to wage. The other firefighters, played by Udit Arora, Jitendra Joshi and Saiyami Kher, are also etched well, and the camaraderie and workplace banter among them (the dialogues by Vijay Maurya are often quite flavourful; a construction magnate, for instance, is called “Mira Road ka Donald Trump”) give a lived-in feel to the scenes set in the fire station. If the aim of Agni was to humanize firefighters and highlight the challenges they must deal with, then we can consider that mission accomplished. However, it also aims to be a police procedural, and here it falters. When Surve and others suspect that an arsonist is at work in Mumbai, they set out to find him, and so do the cops, led by Surve’s brother-in-law, Samit (played with verve by Divyenndu). Given the tension we gave seen between the police and the firefighters in earlier scenes, and the personal animosity between Surve and Samit, I expected these parallel investigations to yield some fireworks, which they don’t. And the identity of the arsonist is not hard to guess either if you are paying attention. But his motive ties in nicely with the film’s overall theme of the neglect firefighters face, and the lines he speaks help imbue the character with tragic shades that make him more than a routine villain. Among what I consider the good Hindi films released this year, this one received perhaps the least attention. It deserved better.

Sector 36

Sector 36, based on the notorious Nithari serial killing case, is not a whodunit. We see the perpetrator, Prem, committing a horrific act within the first five minutes, in one of the film’s many scenes of physical and sexual abuse. (An aside: these scenes, while gruesome, are not “exploitative.” That word is mostly used by pearl-clutching film critics to make their subjective, and often squeamish, notions of what’s palatable look like a moral, objective yardstick for what should or shouldn’t be permissible to show onscreen). It is not really a how-catch-him either; Ram Charan Pandey, the policeman on Prem’s trail, has to perform no Holmesian deduction or gruelling legwork to nab the culprit. And that’s because Sector 36 is a hardboiled/noir variety of crime story. Such stories tend to use individual criminal cases less to make a hero out of the detective/cop who solves them and more to make a point on the social ills that plague us. Thus, the thrust of this film is not how Prem is caught, but how deeply ingrained social inequalities created him and helped him evade capture for so long. Prem shrewdly preys on slum children and, in one case, a prostitute, because these are the types of people nobody would care about when they go missing (unlike the kidnapped kid from a rich family, who is promptly rescued). He knows how little underprivileged victims matter because he has been one himself: when he was a poor, orphaned kid whom his uncle repeatedly raped, nobody bothered to help him. This blurring of the line between victim and victimizer extends to the prostitute. Herself a victim of Balbir, the wealthy man Prem works for, she is not above deriding Prem for being a servant or insulting him in a way that reminds him of the sexual violence he suffered. He describes, during a confession, his urge to kill in physical terms, but you get the feeling that he is just as driven by a psychological need to assert power. He lounges around in Balbir’s clothes when the latter is away and dreams of winning money on a game show, but since he is not Balbir and only a select few can make it to such shows, Prem chooses to experience the power and respect he craves by scaring, subjugating and slaughtering other have-nots. Pandey, for his part, is likewise a complex figure. He has, at first, little empathy for the ‘missing’ kids. During an outburst, he blames his inability to locate them on the lack of resources in his thana, but there’s no denying that a bigger reason is his refusal to see the slum-dwelling people, many of whom are migrants, as his equals. But would things be any different if he were, in fact, a dutiful, dedicated officer? Seeing as how the system he is a part of finds a dozen different ways to thwart him once he does grow a conscience, not to mention what happens to him eventually, one almost wonders if he was better off corrupt and callous. What, after all, can conscience do when faced with money and contacts? This exploration of inequality continues right to the end, in the depiction of the differing fates meted out to Balbir and Prem. A tacked-on coda tries to envision a possibility of justice, but given what we have seen in the rest of the film, this portion comes off as disingenuous. For the most part, though, this is a well-made (Aditya Nimbalkar, the director, really knows how to stage scenes), well-acted film. It is tempting to compare Vikrant Massey’s portrayal of Prem to Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter or Heath Ledger’s Joker, but he is more a kin to Psycho’s Norman Bates and Brady Hartsfield from Mr Mercedes – a deceptively charming, murderous psychopath, yes, but also the product of a abusive household who deserved justice in his own right. In the confession scene, you see these two sides of his persona emerge wonderfully in Massey’s performance: he seems, at once, to be bragging about his deeds, and almost yearning to explain where he comes from. Deepak Dobriyal, given the less flashy part of Pandey, acquits himself equally well, bringing to life a character who changes for the better, only to learn that it makes little difference. There have been better Hindi films this year. But there have been none more disquieting.