Mardaani 2
Written & Directed by: Gopi Puthran
Starring: Rani Mukherjee
Available on Amazon Prime Video
Mardaani 2 is a psycho thriller and it slowly turns into a cat and mouse game between the cop and the killer. The villain, played by a brilliant Vishal Jethwa is introduced to us in a different way; he breaks the fourth wall and often in a creepy way by talking to us about what he thinks of women, thus delving inside his psychology. As I read in Rahul Desai's review of the film, the rape statistics in the beginning and the ending have nothing to do with the film, it doesn't deal with any intricacies or the aftermath of rape in the larger scheme of things. It is just used like a click bait thumbnail on a YouTube video, where they just want you to take the film seriously.
The film clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the recent classic psycho killer Tamil movie, Raatsasan. The autopsy scene where the doctor describes what the victim went through in brutal detailing is an example, though in Raatsasan they rely only on sound to convey the horrors of what the victim went through and because of no graphic violence Raatsasan got an U/A. Here, we almost see graphic imagery of the victim; I'm not a huge fan. For me, showing graphic imagery to instill fear in the audience is equivalent to throwing a toy lizard on someone to scare them. That is not a film making tool, the audience can choose to see those graphic imagery else where; they don't come to watch films just for the film maker to remind them about this. In Raatsasan, the fear arises from our imagination, there is scope for the audience to participate in the storytelling. After the autopsy scene, we see shots of young school girls and we hear that music and we start imagining the worst.
Mardaani 2 is a psycho thriller and it slowly turns into a cat and mouse game between the cop and the killer. The villain, played by a brilliant Vishal Jethwa is introduced to us in a different way; he breaks the fourth wall and often in a creepy way by talking to us about what he thinks of women, thus delving inside his psychology. As I read in Rahul Desai's review of the film, the rape statistics in the beginning and the ending have nothing to do with the film, it doesn't deal with any intricacies or the aftermath of rape in the larger scheme of things. It is just used like a click bait thumbnail on a YouTube video, where they just want you to take the film seriously.
The film clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the recent classic psycho killer Tamil movie, Raatsasan. The autopsy scene where the doctor describes what the victim went through in brutal detailing is an example, though in Raatsasan they rely only on sound to convey the horrors of what the victim went through and because of no graphic violence Raatsasan got an U/A. Here, we almost see graphic imagery of the victim; I'm not a huge fan. For me, showing graphic imagery to instill fear in the audience is equivalent to throwing a toy lizard on someone to scare them. That is not a film making tool, the audience can choose to see those graphic imagery else where; they don't come to watch films just for the film maker to remind them about this. In Raatsasan, the fear arises from our imagination, there is scope for the audience to participate in the storytelling. After the autopsy scene, we see shots of young school girls and we hear that music and we start imagining the worst.
The backstory of the villain was creatively used and revealed, instead of doing a flashback or by doing it explicitly. The time limit which they added in the film didn't add any sort of tension because the grammar of the film wasn't visibly affected in anyway by that time bound, it was just there for the sake of it. The way the villain picks women, it's horrifying and these scenes clearly ask our women to not trust strangers and to be more cynical and rude than to be in trouble. The villain's character and ideology is a reminder to some of our men that if your thoughts are even slightly inclined to how he's thinking, then you're in trouble. The craft is never recognizable in the film, they chose to let the crafts just help in keeping the audience in the world and not to help creating the world. Overall, it's a decently made thriller.
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