Review of Kahaani (2012) by Reuben S — 05 Feb 2014

One line summary: Brave pregnant woman searches for her missing husband amidst corruption.

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The film opens with some experiments on rats. Looks like nerve gas. Soon thereafter, there is a mass death on a train when a vial of the stuff is broken in one of the cars. End segment.

Vidya travels from London, UK to Kolkata, West Bengal, IN to find her husband. He talked to her everyday since he left London, up until about two weeks previous.

At the first the police have no idea. The place where he worked claimed he worked says they made no assignments for him, and he did not report to them. The police suggest a body; she does not recognise it. She and the police go to where his uncle lived, but no one will say that they know of him. They get the same sort of response at the school where he did his studies in youth. The cops investigate the airline records; no one of his name left London nor arrived in Kolkata on the given dates.

Vidya reached out to Agnes, who does some digging, but finds locked files. Oi. She remembers a man with another name (Milan Damji) who looked just like Vidya's picture of her husband. Soon thereafter, Agnes is murdered. A police official (Khan) who is targeting the company NDC interviews her about her relationship to Agnes. The experiments at the beginning of the film were done at NDC.

Khan and his boss reach out to outlier intelligence personnel to solve the crime of the rail attack. The bad guys attempt to scare Vidya with a visit from the man who assassinated Agnes. Vidya and Rana continue to investigate her husband's real movements before he disappeared.

Will Vidya find out the truth? Is her husband still alive? Will the miscreants be brought to justice?

------Scores-------.

Cinematography: 6/10 Lots of VHS level shooting, lots of amateurish footage.

Sound: 8/10 Mostly fine, but some of the incidental music is annoying to say the least.

Acting: 7/10 Reasonable. The is mostly a one-woman show, but the one woman is not nearly stellar enough to carry a two hour movie. The long-suffering Parambrata Chatterjee gave a good performance, which almost counterbalanced the rotten work of Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Saswata Chatterjee as the assassin was not very believable either.

Screenplay: 0/10 Absurd. The bad guys could have defused this at many junctures with relative ease. A single knife thrust, for instance, and no one would be left who cared enough to keep the investigation going. So, this is PC nonsense with an unconvincing lead. The last five minutes were the worst in that regard.