If there were a world in which simply “Why?” could pass off as a professional film review, I’d happily live in it. But here I am instead, wondering how to do my job, after 164 minutes of precisely the kind of movie that makes Bollywood everyone’s favourite punching bag. Priyadarshan’s Haiwaan, a remake of Priyadarshan’s Oppam, is inane in so many ways that one is spoiled for choice. I had vowed to be kinder and calmer to bad thrillers; it’s easy to be entertaining when the only motive is to surprise the audience. But this kindness and calmness disappeared two scenes in, when the blind protagonist sings a happy-go-lucky song and dances optimistically on a ferry to Mumbai like a 1980s hero striving in the wrong decade; this is moments after he is introduced as a part-time wrestler, guitarist and all-round truster who has just fixed his sister’s marriage. It’s hard not to be defeated by the delusionally dated tone before the premise even begins.
And what a premise it is. Our man Shyam (Saif Ali Khan) — who wears blindness like a Ray Ban-coded fashion aesthetic — is the maintenance manager of an upscale housing society. It is repeatedly established that Shyam sees better than those who actually can; he recognises people from the way they smell, move, eat, speak, think, feel, lie, burp, exist. One of the ‘twists’ later shows him deducing like Sherlock that a killer ate pizza before the murder because he could smell it on his fingers when they got into a scuffle; imagine if said killer had an upset stomach and ran out of tissue paper. But I digress. So Shyam is much-loved by all the residents, a househelp named Naina (Shriya Pilgaonkar), the old-but-gold security guard (the late Asrani) whose Muslim name becomes a punchline, other guards whose idea of banter with Shyam is “look at Naina tonight, who would say she’s a servant?”, delivery agents, kids, dogs, rats, and a retired judge named Pradhan (Boman Irani).
This Pradhan chap trusts Shyam with his life, enough to take him to the hills every month and confide in him about his guilt of sentencing an innocent man named Parshuram in a rape case; he fears that Parshuram is now out for revenge. This is the kind of film where Pradhan starts telling this story on a cliff — the camera finds different angles and heights and reverbs to make the exposition visually diverse — and it suddenly cuts to them back in Mumbai mid-sentence. What did they do on the drive back? Did Pradhan stay silent? Did Shyam wait patiently for him to continue? Did they speak about the weather in between? Why do movies think it’s normal to do this? Why is the background score throwing a fit? Why do transition shots of the city look like they’ve been filmed on a handi-cam by aliens who are fascinated by the concept of traffic?
Haiwaan is essentially about a blind caretaker standing in between a deranged serial killer and complete revenge. Noble Shyam is soon framed for the murder of Pradhan, but he must stop Parshuram — who has a penchant for finishing off entire families because his own family killed themselves out of shame — from getting to Pradhan’s illegitimate daughter. But the film keeps forgetting what it’s about; at no point does it look like it understands the point. One dispensable subplot follows another until the story becomes a parody of itself. Shyam’s initial scenes with Pradhan’s little girl in Dehradun unfold like a children’s musical going through an identity crisis. Does nobody think that Pradhan might be a sex creep who’s preying on Shyam’s disability? Wouldn’t that have been the sort of twisted thriller that merits the title ‘Haiwaan’?
Every idea chooses the worst possible route to fruition. To stage the murder in a dark apartment, for instance, an engagement ceremony downstairs (featuring product shots of a jewellery brand) causes the power-cut; this engagement in turn happens after the film spends three scenes on a young interfaith couple who get caught in an empty apartment and trigger a society meeting only for a soon-to-be-offed Pradhan to play peacemaker. To stage Shyam as a victim, it’s not enough that the cops doubt him; they mock his blindness, thrash him in front of his family at his village, turn him into a sad-violins victim, and then serve up 30 minutes of ‘casual’ police brutality so that Shyam can go all Sunny Deol on them (remember he’s a wrestler too?).
The film’s capacity to distract us, and accidentally distract itself, is a sight to behold. To stage the death of a stranger falling onto an unsuspecting car from the balcony, first the girl driving the car is established as ‘modern’ through a jazzy Mumbai-night montage that looks like a tourist brochure gone wrong; in an older movie she’d be smoking and drinking and be slut-shamed a bit to show that only such reckless women deserve to be traumatised. To reveal that not all of Parshuram’s family members died, the film thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to show one of them sitting upright in a white sheet before being loaded into an ambulance. It’s a moment that broke my resolve. Most of the second half is a loop of Parshuram shadowing Shyam around the city and looking at him suspiciously from the background only for Shyam to detect his presence (perhaps he’s a biryani fiend). It becomes an endless cat-and-mouse game where the film seems allergic to both cats and mice.
The climax happens in Dehradun, where at least one of the men dresses as a nun and acts so awfully that the writing has to justify it by pre-mentioning a mental-hospital stint. That’s the amusing thing about the performances. Saif Ali Khan plays Shyam as if the twist is that he’s pretending to be blind (he even looks shakier in darker spaces) and nice, but the anti-twist is that he is actually blind and nice. Akshay Kumar plays Parshuram as if the twist is that he’s a hallucinatory character who does not exist, but the anti-twist is that he’s real and not some psychological gimmick. Sharib Hashmi plays a bad cop as if the twist is that he’s secretly a good cop, but the anti-twist is that he’s an exasperating cop. The film plays a suspense-for-dummies story as if the twist is that it’s smart, but the anti-twist is that it’s genuinely daft. Basically, even ambition is a red herring. A last-gasp cameo by Mohanlal, who starred in the original, is like adding a cherry on clay so that people mistake it for a cake. The most constructive criticism I can offer is: Why? The kindest thing I can say about Haiwaan is that it ends.