NH10 is praiseworthy to watch one time for chills and
thrills with several heart-in-your-mouth moments and a terrific performance of Anushka
Sharma.
When you are encountered with mortal danger, you can either
fight or flee. NH 10 takes us on a voyage in which both fleeing and fighting
struggle for space, till the time comes to stop running.
NH10, a movie which has been projected as an action
thriller, is really a new kind of horror affair where fears continues to lurk
from every hook and corner with real humans, and not ghosts, threaten to horrify
you out of your skin.
When young, good-looking, urban professional Meera (Anushka
Sharma) urges her husband (Neil Bhoopalam) to run away from the men who are
terrorizing them, she is doing what impulsively comes to most of us. When she
turns around to face the enemy, we want to cheer. Because this is a lone woman
in a man’s world, the kind of world where women are killed before they are
born, or dumped, after they draw their first breath, in rubbish bins. It is the
land of the Khaps, where caste and gender determine whether you will live or
die. Or, worse, how you will live and die.
A couple on a road trip, towards a romantic destination.
They go off track and get lost. Something terrible happens. A crazed killer (or
a bunch of them) on the prowl, the couple make a run for it, all leading up to
a pyrrhic ending. It’s been done before thousands of times in cinema; but
unless you count Ram Gopal Varma’s Road, it’s never been done before
in Bollywood. Director Navdeep Singh serves up the first taste of the slasher
road trip genre in NH10, and the results are pretty good.
NH10 is not an easy movie to watch. In a ghost flick,
you can still afford to sneak out a nervous laughter because you know that it
is mainly make believe. But how do you erase that tension which arises out of
real situations, where as an audience you are as much a part of the journey
that Anushka Sharma and Neil Bhoopalam take on NH10?
For NH10, Singh, who directed the excellent Manorama
Six Feet Under (which borrowed a few bits from Chinatown), takes plentiful
helpings of the British thriller Eden Lake. The basic plotline remains the
same – urban husband and wife heading towards a countryside birthday
destination are plunged into a cat and mouse game with a bunch of cutthroat
rural locals. A lot of blood spills from both sides. Instead of Fassbender and
Kelly Reilly, we have Neil Bhoopalam and Anushka Sharma on the run, and the
villains have been switched from weird rednecks to regressive North Indians
villagers.
NH10 makes for a gritty, gruesome, disturbing and
haunting movie watching affair, as director Navdeep Singh makes good use of
technology at his disposal (background score, sound design, cinematography,
editing) to ensure effective storytelling.
It is not as much as cuss words as violence - both physical
and mental - which makes NH10 a really dark affair. There is no
respite whatever from the very opening scene of the movie itself when Anushka
and Neil drive around the roads of the Millennium City on a dark-cold night.
You know that the glitz would soon make way for the bloodshed and wholesome
brutality that would follow, where you don't doubt for one minute that the end
result would certainly not be pleasant.
On the performance front, Anushka Sharma is so much
convincing and perfect in the most challenging role of her career so far and
opens up altogether different prospects for herself as an actor. Neil Bhoopalam
is appealing in his part that where he does make one feel for him to have taken
a life threatening impulsive step.
Darshan Kumaar may not have as much screen time as Mary
Kom but his haunting presence fills up every frame once he arrives on
screen first. Another actor who just makes you hate her right from scene one
is Deepti Naval. From being a stereotypical mother role (as she
was in another Gurgaon based film Aurangzeb), the veteran actress is seen
maybe in her first ever violent character.
NH10 is not a blaring, loud movie that caricatures
women empowerment. This is the movie that lets its silences stun you. It
finally breaks the ‘damsel in distress’ stereotype by showing a woman standing
up against rapey mobsters with an iron rod. It’s unsettling, and it’s
refreshing as hell.
There’s a scene where Sharma’s character Meera places her
weapon aside, casually lights a cigarette and finishes it slowly, before
finishing off a goon. The violence is actually more subtle than you expect it
to be, partly because it is executed maturely and partly because we get ghastlier,
bloodier, more eye crushingly vicious U-rated movies on a regular basis.
There are a few debatable lapses in logic, like when the
couple uses a map chart instead of Google Maps on their expensive iPhones, and
still lose their way. At times, the movie overdoes it and keeps telling you
‘North India is full of horrible people’, because everyone in the film is
seemingly out to kill the couple. Yes, some of the patriarchal rubbish in this
country needs to be addressed, but does every man in the movie need to be
antagonistic to convey the point? Some scenes set in the dark look fake because
of the artificial lighting. The songs, barring the end credits, are dissonantly
out of sync with the tone of the movie – they were visibly shoehorned in for
commercial purposes.
In general, it is worthy to watch once for chills and
thrills with several heart-in-your-mouth moments and a terrific performance of Anushka
Sharma.
