Director: Anurag Kashyap.
Raman Raghav 2.0 star cast: Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vicky Kaushal, Shobhita Dhulipala, Amruta Subhash, Vipin Sharma.
The film is based on the story of the notorious Raman Raghav who infested the streets of Bombay(now Mumbai) in the mid-to-late 1960s. The serial killer who confessed to doing away with more than 40 people, was the subject of Sriram Raghavan’s film in 1991. Kashyap’s contemporary retread is a return to familiar dark territory — kinetic hand-held camerawork in the slushy slums and narrow alleys, which he has been using since Black Friday, whose unforgettable chase scene is replicated here too, but not with such acuity.
And that’s the problem with this film, which doesn’t give its characters enough nuance to go on with. We submit to the unwatchable or to immense depravity in the hope that we will learn something about ourselves as a race. What turns us into ravening beasts? Or worse, because some beasts are truly gentle. We don’t get the layers which will lead us into an understanding.
I wanted to know more about what shaped Ramanna, what made him who he is, what makes him do the things he does. There is a segment with his sister(Amruta Subhash, terrific), which hints at a disturbed past and is the most effective part of the film, but it is too brief. Ramanna’s insouciance is at once repellant and magnetic, but the lack of detailing reduces the supremely talented Nawazuddin to a man trailing a rod, whose bright eyes and the chilling awareness of what he is doing doesn’t add to up to showing us what he really is.