Movie Review: Judgementall Hai Kya (Hindi)
Judgementall Hai Kya, directed by Prakash Kovelamudi, is both orignal and frustrating. It doesn't leave us with easy answers, nor does it make it for an easy watch. The film — opening with a special thanks to Sriram Raghavan — primes us for a character study of a wonderfully kooky Bobby, but also wants to be a dark humour-laced suspense thriller about a psychopath and a pyromaniac, and also a psychodrama about gaslighting and resorting to psychological manipulation to discredit others in an attempt to invalidate their version of events.
It doesn't help that the movie is narrated from the point of view of an erratic, unreliable protagonist. We all know how this will end, don't we? Bobby, we're told, has trouble separating the real from the reel. The movie, as long as it stays with Bobby, soars, propelled along by Daniel B. George's groovy score and Pankaj Kumar's disorienting neon-lit cinematography that seems to mirror the fractured psyche of a 20-something woman suffering from childhood trauma.
Working as a dubbing artiste for B-grade South Indian movies, she immerses herself into the characters she voices, dreaming up scenarios, and photoshopping her face into film stills (including Queen, Tanu Weds Manu, and Rangoon). But when Keshav and his girlfriend move in to a flat next door, the voyeur in her sees things that aren't there, and before long, a death pits them both: it's his version versus hers.
Kovelamudi and his writer/wife Kanika Dhillon — who also plays a minor part as Sita in Ramayan 2.0, a modern reimagining of the epic, that leads Bobby on a path to prove that Keshav is the villain and he should be the one to prove his innocence of the crime — a not so subtle reference to the #MeToo movement where the onus often rests on the accuser as opposed to the accused — set up an intriguing cat-and-mouse game, exploring a shaky territory with firm control.
But then the curse of the second half strikes. The screenplay wobbles and goes off the rails in its middle act, and comes completely undone in what's a rushed, far-fetched connect-the-dots climax that feels as if it's slipped in from an entirely different movie. The focus shifts away from Bobby, new characters and unconvincing subplots are thrusted in, and worse, her psychotic state is insensitively played for laughs (and as a major red herring), thereby overshadowing its empathetic gaze.
Despite some top draw performances from Kangana Ranaut and Rajkummar Rao (as always), what, thus, starts off as a compelling portrait of a woman who's over the edge and a story about what exactly is "normal" devolves into an ennui-inducing paint-by-numbers serial murder mystery that's too convenient and lacks nuance. Judgementall Hai Kya is to mental disorder what war is to peace.
Working as a dubbing artiste for B-grade South Indian movies, she immerses herself into the characters she voices, dreaming up scenarios, and photoshopping her face into film stills (including Queen, Tanu Weds Manu, and Rangoon). But when Keshav and his girlfriend move in to a flat next door, the voyeur in her sees things that aren't there, and before long, a death pits them both: it's his version versus hers.
Kovelamudi and his writer/wife Kanika Dhillon — who also plays a minor part as Sita in Ramayan 2.0, a modern reimagining of the epic, that leads Bobby on a path to prove that Keshav is the villain and he should be the one to prove his innocence of the crime — a not so subtle reference to the #MeToo movement where the onus often rests on the accuser as opposed to the accused — set up an intriguing cat-and-mouse game, exploring a shaky territory with firm control.
But then the curse of the second half strikes. The screenplay wobbles and goes off the rails in its middle act, and comes completely undone in what's a rushed, far-fetched connect-the-dots climax that feels as if it's slipped in from an entirely different movie. The focus shifts away from Bobby, new characters and unconvincing subplots are thrusted in, and worse, her psychotic state is insensitively played for laughs (and as a major red herring), thereby overshadowing its empathetic gaze.
Despite some top draw performances from Kangana Ranaut and Rajkummar Rao (as always), what, thus, starts off as a compelling portrait of a woman who's over the edge and a story about what exactly is "normal" devolves into an ennui-inducing paint-by-numbers serial murder mystery that's too convenient and lacks nuance. Judgementall Hai Kya is to mental disorder what war is to peace.
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