Some years ago, I watched a small marvel that drew heavily yet dutifully from Roman Polanski's 1974 masterpiece, Chinatown. The film in question had captured the tenor of rural India so accurately, I could almost feel the graininess of the barren highways and dusty terrains. Navdeep Singh's impressively constructed Manorama: Six Feet Under was remade with faithful reverence and slid into an Indian setting so neatly, I soon forgot that the original story had a distinctly American flavor to it.
NH10, his second feature that borrows this time from the terrifying and stunning 2008 British thriller that made sure I did not venture outside for a while, Eden Lake, is set in a starker environment that lacks the inspired lethargy of his debut's, but it gets the moody, vicious aura of the country's northern badlands on the mark. It's a tragedy, the scariest to come trudging along in a while, told with dogged brutishness and directness of manner, and that perhaps is what sets it apart from other Hindi films tackling a similar theme. There's no pontificating, no pomposity, which is surprising enough for a Hindi film that adopts a condemnatory approach to the atrocious problems that rural India has got itself entangled in.
A trick that filmmakers often resort to to amplify the horror of two upright protagonists trying to cope with something unpleasant and unfamiliar to them is to show them leading a seemingly perfect, content life before deliberately plunging them in the bowels of brutality. It is a crafty ploy that never fails, and it is used to great effect in NH10. It cuts a disturbingly clear line between what is acceptable in the urban and rural parts of the country and how the law is reshaped in the two, which explains why an urbane couple from Gurgaon--the protagonists of this joyride--embrace their haplessness with wide-eyed alarm. For someone used to being cushioned by a law that works, the horrors of NH10 come across as ghastly - and utterly believable.
After the story switches gears and inevitably transfigures into a functioning chase film, Singh controls the growing suspense with considerable deftness. Most of the action happens in the desolate stretches of arid land next to the highway against the black skies, an added bonus for a chase film, and with only a handful of characters. It's deeply satisfying to be a part of a no-frills, uncomplicated narrative that only wishes to toy with suspense, violence, fear and long, anxious silences, and Singh leisurely milks every moment to make it worth your time. For the most part, this goes down rather well, with the actors bringing a sense of credibility complete with the dialect of the region to their vaguely-sketched characters, until too many coincidences render the narrative strained and fabricated instead of organic.
And it's such a damper. For a bracing final showdown, Singh and his writer Sudip Sharma inundate the story with absurd twists that intend to give a quick glimpse into the minds of those who perpetrate honor killings or defend them, but it doesn't add any juice to either the plot or the characters. The final fifteen minutes make a strong case for feminism, and the grim, undeniable pleasure one feels to watch these sexist men, who habitually refer to women a Hindi slang term for "whore," getting violently harassed one by one by a resolute woman with a crushed conscience is overwhelming and, in a mad way, comforting. (The guy sitting next to me loudly called for the act of revenge to be grislier and cheered when the plucky female protagonist went for these men on her own, and I did not shush him.)
However, that does not make up for its failings. The film never pays a nod to its original. The twists are feeble in their impact, and the characters often do things only characters in a movie would think of doing. If only the film would have been more naturalistic and the late twists would have been discarded entirely, it would have been a more accessible, more urgent film. If only.
The worst thing a thriller can be is predictable, and NH10 unfortunately is an addition to that category. But, the best thing a predictable thriller can be is satisfying. And the macabre NH10, with its socially aware zeal and determination to unmask the perpetual feeling of dread our women have to walk around with everyday, falls into that category, too.
