'Red like jungle burning bright', sang a blonde-pated David Bowie back in the 80s, as the title song for the horror classic 'Cat People'. In the present day, Anurag Kashyap unleashes a red-eyed monster for our times, straight out of a slasher gore-fest of the 80s, with a name that belonged to a real-life murder of yore. The film announces its bawdy, lurid intentions right from the rollickingly coked-up beginning- 'Raman Raghav 2.0' is not, as one would assume, based on the infamous eponymous serial killer who prowled and preyed upon the streets and its sleepers in the Technicolor Bombay of the 60s.
No, rather, this is its own beast and even as its gloriously psychopathic protagonist (or protagonists) may borrow actions and deranged decisions from the namesake, he himself is a freewheeling creature of the night, a freak of nature red in tooth and claw.
It is this bold, cocky impulse to break the mould of fact and to go beyond the genre rules that makes Kashyap's film bloody brilliant- a terse, sweltering and often sombre celebration of nihilism and a stark portrait of an urban society soaked in brutality.
It begins with a breakneck start- a cop chopping up lines of coke and then messing it all up, as it goes up his hungry nostrils. The film, shuffling between the twin character strands, gains the simmering intensity of a finely sculpted David Fincher or Michael Mann police procedural. However, 'Raman Raghav 2.0' smashes these walls and turns out to be something headier than just a line of coke.
Ramanna, a red-eyed tramp without shelter or refuge, loves to kill. That is all he knows, perhaps- though he also knows how to deliver a monologue or even cook chicken gravy. For all his blood-thirst, he is also surprisingly clumsy and yet endowed with a plucky spirit that makes him survive and even evade capture. Yet, he is himself driven towards a single goal- to meet and look up to one man who has somehow impressed his strange tastes.
That man turns out to be Raghav, a rugged cop who is doggedly handling the case even as struggling with his own inner demons. Caught in a peculiar sexual affair with a woman he picked up at a disco not so long ago, he is also an unscrupulous enforcer who would not hesitate to shed some blood to make his ends meet. Kashyap and co-writer Vasan Bala sneaks up to and sticks stealthily with these two damaged men as they inevitably come closer to each other in a perfect, homoerotic union. The director has claimed, in a flash of irony, that this might be his most romantic film. Oh, hold on. It is.
Even with the morally queasy premise that it presents, which turns darker and grimmer with each turn, this is a film which does not skimp on style. Sure, Jay Oza's textured, immersive cinematography ducks and sneaks over many a harsh urban cityscape- grimy, underlit ghettoes, shoddy residences and sordid suburban wastes- but it is also mesmeric, even elegiac in its brutality. The way he and Kashyap bring unexpected texture to the morally blank proceedings is astounding- from glistening sweat after rough, loveless sex to aeroplanes sweeping over murky tenements. Unlike the similarly nihilistic and equally powerful 'Ugly', which looked on baldly at an unfurnished world of scoundrels, this is a sexy, gorgeous film.
However, everything else is far from gorgeous. This is indeed a brutal, bloody, visceral experience and 'Raman Raghav 2.0' does not stray away from the thudding core of psychopathic rage at its core. The murders are grisly, shocking but Kashyap never overplays it- his violence is aptly unsettling but resonant and never gratuitous. There is no thrill in Ramanna's exploits- no guilty pleasure in his outraged bursts or in the sound of metal pounding human flesh. Yet, the twisted yet finely edited narrative is even more shocking in its brutal indictment of society as one rotten from the core. The dialogue- from raw rapid-fire bursts of acid and arsenic to Ramanna's revealing, intelligent ramblings on nature of life-is hard-hitting in its power while the themes it tackles with bold bravado are searing.
Kashyap has always been an ardent cinephile but while 'Raman Raghav 2.0' is mostly stripped of film-referencing indulgence, the nods that make it are pointed and sensational in their usage. We get a hint of a notoriously gruesome scene from 'Apocalypse Now', here made more startling with a pair of sunglasses and a killer one-liner. And the plot is divided neatly into chapters, much like one of Tarantino's darker films- think 'The Hateful Eight'. But in all its sprawling, sizzling flavor, it is more of a graphic novel. The best parallel for the film could be Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's seminal 'From Hell'- an incendiary, deathly dark debunking of the myths around Jack The Ripper, which also lamented the sorry state of the society at the periphery of the murderer's crimes.
For there are well-judged, pitch-perfect and darkly comic details that thicken the stew with perverse relish. The way Raghav, investigating a crime scene, picks out a plate from a kitchen, not as a clue but for something else. Or Ramanna's fascination with aeroplanes roaring in the skies. Or a domestic maid calling, unknowingly, a stash of powder as homoeopathic medicine.
Special mention should go to Amruta Subhash for playing Ramanna's helplessly bewildered sister, breaking down unforgettably at one moment with both gushing relief and crushing terror and newbie Sobhita Dhulipala playing Raghav's spirited but ultimately vulnerable bed-partner who is best when calmly staring back at Raghav, in midst of one of his violent starts.
As Raghav, Vicky Kaushal is phenomenal and creates a rippling character of sadism and battered masculinity. His rugged, drug-addled and edgy presence is raw and seductive; it is a treat to see him slink away to the corner, watching the interrogations with a defiant indifference mixed with a gaze of silent predicament. He even blazes his lines and snarls when convincingly all poised to bump someone off. A real hair-trigger performance, bravo.
And yet, this is, for all of Raghav's inner demons clawing compellingly their way through the murky gloom, this is ultimately Ramanna's tale and Nawazuddin Siddiqui's film. The actor is in his peak here- endowing his devilish character with an irresistible layer of pluck and slippery bravado that makes us guiltily root for him, even as he commits each murder with unsettling ruthlessness. There is a hypnotic glimmer in his eyes and he makes the scorching lines blaze like fireworks on the screen. His monologues are themselves searing as well as his silent, foolhardy determination to spill some more blood and Siddiqui remains morbidly unpredictable throughout the proceedings. He even grins as deviously as Norman Bates.
'Raman Raghav 2.0' reaches a feverish pitch in one terrifying, protracted sequence early on that feels like a chapter straight out of a Tarantino script. The entire set-up of Ramanna visiting his sister and her husband and child, then locking them up with himself in a prison of doom, all the while cooking chicken, is a masterstroke that needs to be seen to be believed, as Kashyap ratchets up the tension masterfully without ever letting us up and ends it, shockingly, with a cathartic outburst of violence, never shown explicitly but nevertheless shocking.
By now, both the director and the master actor are in peak form, fully confident of the punch they can bring to even the most unexpected moments. You find yourselves grinning wickedly, your head blown clean away as that haunting song 'Behooda' plays in the background- a song that echoes the film's heart of darkness.
As 'Star Wars' fans would say, you don't know the power of the dark side.
My rating- 5 Stars out of 5.
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