Anurag Kashyap is back where he belongs and there is nothing remotely velvety in the director’s felicitous return to his creative comfort zone.
In Raman Raghav 2.0, he gives the go-by to the lawman versus law-breaker binary, the normative pivot of crime dramas.
The film zeroes in on a psychopath’s chilling battle of wits, and nerves, with a sleep-deprived, drug-dependent cop in the seedy back alleys of present-day Mumbai.
The exercise yields a gripping, visceral genre film that intermittently strays into fuzziness only to lift itself up forcefully enough not to lose momentum.
The stylized thriller makes the most of its eight-chapter structure as it hurtles episodically through the nihilism and all-encompassing darkness of Mumbai’s criminal underbelly.
It deals, broadly, with two shades of moral deviance. One manifests itself in the disturbing actions of the crazed serial killer. The other plays out through the downright amoral deeds of a crime branch policeman on a precariously short fuse.
There is, of course, no scope for micro-portraiture here. The film employs broad strokes for diagramming the deep antagonism between the demented death-merchant and the dodgy defender of the law.
Watching Raman Raghav 2.0 is, therefore, somewhat like reading an incomplete map, with many boundaries and dabs of crucial info either completely missing or too inchoate to decipher.
But that isn’t such a bad thing. The film demands from its audience more than the usual level of mental focus in order to mark off the units as they flash by with dizzying pace.
The venomous Ramanna ( Nawazuddin Siddiqui) , armed with a wheel wrench, scours the streets and slums of Mumbai and strikes at random - and targeted - victims.
?
Snatches of dialogue inform the audience that the man has killed nine people in the last two and a half years.
Even as he is at it, Ramanna’s sight is set on a young cop, Raghavan ( Vicky Kaushal) , whom he trails without let in a cat-and-mouse game in which it is impossible to tell the feline from the rodent, and the hunter from the hunted.
?
Does Ramanna’s obsession with Raghavan stem from his realization that the cop might actually be his mirror image: an equally impulsive and unrepentant killer?
This narrative construct in which evil holds untrammeled sway definitely isn’t free of genre cliches. But Kashyap informs the twisted tale with quirky touches that stall chances of the drama falling into an overly familiar loop