With films like Kahaani, Ek Villain, Hindi thriller films are thriving.
By Madhav Khanna
CHICAGO: I recently walked into Sriram Raghavan’s film ‘Badlapur’ with high hopes. Since I was a fan of the director and of the genre, Badlapur got me thinking about the state of the Indian thriller film and how far we had come.
Being a child of the 90’s, my first exposure to a thriller came when I saw Baazigar and Darr. Shah Rukh Khan cemented a place in the movie industry and I fell in love with the genre. I grew up watching classics like The Silence of the Lambs, Teesri Manzil, the Usual Suspects, Sixth Sense and even the ultimate thriller, Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Yet, I longed for another Indian film, which could hold me like The Usual Suspects did or even surprise me with an unexpected end. I had to wait a long time till one day I walked into a theater and lo and behold here was Satya. Now Satya isn’t exactly a thriller, yet it’s important to mention it here since its influence germinated a plethora of directors and writers to re-examine the crime, gangster and thriller genres. It is a benchmark for the Indian film. Before there was Lagaan, before there was Dil Chahta Hain, there was Satya.
Satya reinvigorated the audience into believing that a movie could be greater than the sum of it parts. It also began a change in the way viewers looked at a Hindi movie. It was no longer bad action movies with double meaning dialogues, no this was gritty, real and after a very long time true to its subject.
Yet, it was a while before Ram Gopal Verma rose above Satya (in fact I doubt he ever will) and we were in the doldrums again. Then just as I had almost given up hope came Sriram Raghavan’s, Ek Hasina Thi. Produced by our very own Ramu, it was a neo-noir thriller in the same vein as Memento and Blade Runner and it blew the audiences away. We finally had a director who understood the medium and knew how to exploit it. He was dark, dangerous and most of all did not cop out of his story half way through – I was in love.
Since Ek Hasina Thi, the thriller movie has seen a revival of sorts with the genre becoming a staple part of what the audience expects to consume. The floodgates had opened but it took a while for the water to flow out. We had great films like Gulaal, Manorama Six Feet Under (which I believe is perhaps one of the best independent films ever made), Raghavan’s Johnny Gaddaar, which led a revival of the genre in India.
Much later did I realize that there was a movie, which had preceded all of these, made by a relatively unknown figure at the time but a star in his own right– Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday. These movies led a renaissance of kinds for the thriller genre in Hindi cinema.
More recently we had the sublime A Wednesday, the extraordinary Shahid and the masterful Kahaani. These films have redefined what a commercial Hindi movie stands for. The audience no longer cares only for the typical musical love story or the over dramatized formula films. They are interested in the mystery and intrigue of the story. They want to be of the edge of their seats waiting with bated breath for that end which leaves them mesmerized.
After watching Badlapur and before that Ek Villian, I can very confidently say that the Indian thriller is thriving. All I can do now is wait for the next great thrillers to bowl me over. Dibaker Banerjee reinventing Byomkesh Bakshi and Anushka Sharma on a road trip to hell. I can’t wait!