‘System’ Movie Review: A Flat and Derivative Crime Thriller

System stars Sonakshi Sinha as a privileged young professional who strives to shed the ‘nepo-baby’ tag by breaking free from the shadow of an influential father. The meta casting is a common Bollywood gimmick: a version of Deepika Padukone and Siddhant Chaturvedi playing the restless outsiders in Gehraiyaan. The context here supplies the characterisation. Sinha’s Neha Rajvansh might be the daughter of a big-shot lawyer, but her rite of passage includes a ‘lowly’ stint at the state prosecutor’s office. Her reel-clicking, selfie-taking and manicured fingers must toil in the trenches to earn her place in her father’s empire: a legal-world equivalent of industry kids landing jobs as assistant directors before they are launched in big-budget productions. Like her old man, Neha treats her career as a medium of winning, not a battle for justice. When he challenges her to win ten cases in a row, she gets cracking — with the help of the court stenographer, Sarika (Jyotika). All she cares about is the gold at the end of this rainbow.

Naturally, Neha will grow a bleeding heart during this journey. It’s a familiar template: the entitled brat is humbled through an unlikely bond with a person from the opposite end of the social spectrum. Her ultimate challenge, of course, will be going up against her invincible dad, Ravi “The Fox” Rajvansh (Ashutosh Gowarikar), in a murder case that involves a family friend. System almost counts on our perception of Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s filmography and the dominant themes in at least two (Nil Battey Sannata, Panga) of her Hindi features. Neha is surrounded by wolves who will stop at nothing to gatekeep a male-dominated field; this includes a father who infantilises her, a brother who teases her, a boyfriend who needs her time, a reporter who takes pleasure in her failures.

The obvious thing is that an experienced Sarika becomes Neha’s go-girl enabler. She’s had the life of hard knocks — paralysed husband, dead brother, tiny home, a gifted daughter she hopes to provide for — that people like Neha can only exoticise. The cases they take on feature male predators and criminals, so the message is clear, especially because Neha is fated to take on a toxic father who has protected his wealthy clients by gaming the system. It’s inevitable that Neha discovers her identity as a woman with a voice under Sarika’s tutelage.

In theory, I like that System uses the modern suspects — gender empowerment, sisterhood, a coming-of-age arc, smashing North Indian patriarchy — as a front for old-fashioned conflicts of class rage and revenge. The plot has more in common with a ‘90s potboiler like Baazigar (except the twist here is in the climax) than any of the new-age feminist dramas it initially looks like. But the narrative conceit is clunky, as is the treatment. Even if the tropes are vintage, it doesn’t explain the creative abbreviations of the film-making. Or the “dumbing down,” so to speak. There are early signs. It opens with a jail scene straight out of a bygone era, complete with the title dramatically appearing against the hanging legs of an inmate. The background score goes from pensive to playful in a second because the posh protagonist is then introduced in her chauffeur-driven car heading to court. The abrupt switches of moods — where the music becomes an audience prompt in every scene without any transition — are dead giveaways. It’s not even a pet peeve any more, it’s a wild peeve.

The flattening continues with the way Neha is staged; she’s flimsy, almost to the point of being an heiress with a law degree, because she scrolls through the content of a trendy Instagram food influencer instead of going through case files every morning. She jokes with her brother about stinking after work because the public prosecutor’s office does not have air conditioning. She treats Sarika to Chai Latte in their first ‘official’ meeting so that their contrast is reduced to crowd-pleasing binaries; dialogue like “justice is like god, it’s hard to achieve” does not help. As a result, Neha’s transformation is all too predictable, particularly after she has a spat with her cocky dad (who threatens like an AI-generated hologram) and leaves their mansion to prove a point. Her interest in Sarika’s life is loaded with artifice, too, like a South Delhi burbie strolling through a museum of middle-class living.

Which is to say: the central character may be unserious, but it need not give the storytelling itself the license to be unserious. The production design and cinematography are generic to the extent of Delhi resembling Mumbai; the female-bonding montages are formulaic. The twist is ancient and, despite the not-so-dramatically-charged courtroom scenes, it exposes Neha as a gullible little princess who exists to be taken advantage of by everyone she knows. In short, even her competence is incompetent. Sinha isn’t allowed to dig deeper or personalise Neha as a reverse-nepotism striver, because the premise is too busy being accessible.

The performances are nothing to write home about. Ashutosh Gowarikar, as Neha’s father and a Delhi celebrity, is miscast. Regardless of circumstances, there’s a smugness about Ravi that never goes away (even when he’s sincere). Forget the aura of retro dads, Ravi sounds mechanically preachy, like an awkward mix of a wise detective and an Amar Chitra Katha figure; you’d think he were directing people, not conversing with them. The three younger men (brother, boyfriend, scribe) in Neha’s life are interchangeable. Jyotika is the only one who does the job as Sarika, a character who doesn’t hide the fact that she’s the quiet underdog of a parallel story. She’s effective enough for us to notice when Sarika Rawat isn’t on screen, which raises suspicions in a script that isn’t as clever as it imagines.

Which brings me to the gaze of this script. It is visibly conceived and told from an urban-saviour perspective, where class rage and morality and injustice become culturally appropriated gimmicks for upscale voices. This is often passed off as masala cinema, but not all high-pitched movies about society can stem from previous movies. The manner in which Sarika’s situation is crafted and resolved says a lot about how we fetishise the ‘other’ under the guise of empathising with them. For instance, at first it seems refreshing that Sarika isn’t judged for having an affair; she has needs that her wheelchair-laden husband cannot tend to. But this is undone when an ulterior motive is revealed; it’s not enough that she’s human. System is the kind of book or movie that Neha herself would write: all broad strokes and armchair commentary. It’s a pity, given the solid framework of the film. Perhaps the reason System feels derivative is because it epitomises the system of mainstream Hindi film these days. It was never meant to be so methodical. Art was never meant to be an arrangement.