Nawazuddin Siddiqui, playing a limping scoundrel who concocts his own plans to gain from the thickening muddle, lends even more credibility to the proceedings crooked, deceitful and yet utterly vulnerable, the actor also conveys a sense of lovelorn pathos, of a perverse dignity of a scrappy mongrel of these mean streets.īut all this promise comes to waste in the film’s end. Everyone seems to be living in aesthetically artistic houses and even the cheap hotels and the cacophonous fleshpots on the screen seem to be decorated too gaily.Īlso read: Great Plot Twists In Hindi Cinema You Didn’t See Comingīut even these are forgiven, to some extent, by virtue of the clever casting of mostly believable and unfamiliar faces populating this underside of the city and the occasionally realistic dialogue (having Anurag Kashyap as an assistant writer naturally helps) given to them.
It has the elements then of what should be a nocturnal thriller in the style of the great noirs of the days of John Huston, Carol Reed and Fritz Lang, even as, being a lavishly mounted production from a major studio and featuring stars who would have hardly agreed in the case of more grimy realism, it sometimes looks too good to be convincingly seedy. Inspector Sanjay Shekhawat, played by Aamir Khan with convincing but unmemorable sternness, is assigned the case and as he starts asking questions and picking up clues, what unravels is something more sordid about the victim and the film tugs us loyally to the said underbelly, by introducing a few morally dubious men and women who are aware of a more troubling truth behind it all. This film, on the other hand, not only ends with a twist that a sharper, more discerning viewer can predict easily but also hurriedly tries to tack it to a largely unnecessary sub-plot that belonged to another film as if to explain its distracting importance.Ī body is found drowned in a car off the seafront of Bombay. The novel Brighton Rock and numerous of G.K Chesterton’s Father Brown stories have accomplished it with both ingenuity and realism and yet, in both cases, the mystery lingered on beyond the breadth of the pages and the fantastical or surreal elements were interwoven deftly into the narrative. The fault, it must be said, is not in the idea of a murder mystery probing and prodding a city’s underbelly ending with an audacious, even fantastical surprise that lends the grub and grit of the story a greater significance. Reema Kagti’s Talaash – a film about a respected policeman investigating a baffling case and thus discovering a cupboard of dirty linen – is a competently made and fairly believable thriller that is ruined beyond repair by an ending that is not so much as completely preposterous as much as it is clumsily directed. Bad things happen in most thrillers and some things are broken beyond repair.
#Talaash movie youtube full
Or how at the end of Khamosh, the camera with lurid solemnity gazes up from the level of the corpse at the faces of the film crew staring dumbstruck in amazement in the full glare of the arc lights. One would recall, for instance, the final moments of The Third Man in which Holly Martins waits on the road outside the frozen Austrian cemetery while Anna Schmidt, the woman whom he loves unreasonably and who loved the man whom he killed in cold blood in Vienna’s sewers, walks by coldly, unforgivingly. And unlike what Hitchcock likes to think, a good ending is not necessarily an ingenious twist, an unearned laugh or a sensuous kiss a great thriller can end ideally with a scene in which the mystery lingers on or even a scene of melancholy or ironic reflection at what has happened. In cinema, a thriller is made or marred by how it ends.