'Crazxy' Movie Review: Sohum Shah Leads a Crafty One-Character Thriller

Director: Girish Kohli
Writer: Girish Kohli
Cast: Sohum Shah
Language: Hindi

When a thriller opens with a long single-take shot, it’s a signal of intent. For a film called Crazxy — the spelling can be triggering until you realise it has something to do with an extra chromosome — this signal is very necessary. The shot starts on an 'Ethical Dilemma of Surgery’ book, snakes across the posh apartment and follows its inhabitant, Abhimanyu Sood (Sohum Shah), as he leaves with a bag of cash to his garage. Jesper Kyd’s music is a hybrid of an Ennio Morricone spaghetti-western score and an ‘80s Bachchan potboiler. Within the next five minutes, we learn that this hassled man is a doctor, the amount of money is five crores, it’s April Fool’s Day, his angry boss is waiting at the hospital, and Abhimanyu has Haryanvi driving genes (he takes on a rowdy Gurgaon biker to return a middle finger). It’s clear that Crazxy means business. It’s also clear that Crazxy is better than its title.

When Abhimanyu gets a mysterious call from a man who claims to have kidnapped his teenage daughter, the film slowly morphs into a morality thriller. The suspense lies not in the action so much as in the unraveling of Abhimanyu’s ego and character. He is the antagonist of his own life: a self-involved surgeon with a bitter ex-wife and a neglected daughter with Down’s Syndrome, a needy lover, a ransom to pay, and a professional crisis that he’s hustling to fix. The format is lithe and ambitious — one man in his car with nothing but phone calls (and famous voices), road rage and a race against time. It’s a funky version of Locke (2013), the psychological drama starring Tom Hardy as a British chap whose life crumbles over a series of phone conversations on a long drive.

Being an Indian story, however, it's mandatory that Crazxy has a twist; a trial by fire for the problematic man isn’t enough. This twist is a big swing — so gimmicky that it’s nearly offensive — because the film reveals the identity of the kidnapper well before the climax. It becomes about the Why rather than the Who, but the answer is rooted in the sort of social commentary that villainises the very cause it tries to bat for. Funnily, the broken-are-the-more-evolved-coded twist is almost unnecessary, given that the narrative achieves its goal — of internal transformation — by then. I didn’t care for the ending, but I did admire the skill it takes to get there.

Like most single-character movies, Crazxy works hard to stay visually and kinetically interesting. It depends heavily on the shot-taking, the sound design, Shah’s physical acting and the editing. Thankfully, the craft doesn’t go overboard to offset the real-time premise. The cinematography is creative — the clockwise shots around the car are particularly neat — without flaunting its slickness. The little details add texture and hint at his age. The kidnapper’s ringtone is an Amitabh Bachchan line from Sarkar (2005); Abhimanyu’s ex-wife Bobby’s ringtone is a sad classic; the Inquilaab (1984) anthem ‘Abhimanyu’ becomes a pulpy action theme; a lawyer is listed as ‘black coat’ in his phone and a doctor as ‘white coat’.

I like that the exposition is woven into the phone conversations, most of which impart lived-in history as much as plot information. For instance, Abhimanyu thinks it’s a prank for the longest time because he not only distrusts Bobby (and everyone else), but his own guilt also prevents him from being a proactive dad. The coincidence is suspicious — the ransom demand matches the amount he is already carrying in the car — but you can sense Abhimanyu’s cynicism melting away once his past demons come to the fore. Perhaps the only false note here is the way his girlfriend speaks — swinging between vampish and opportunistic — but she shows a fair bit of mental instability in their exchanges. From the way he reacts to her, one can almost smell the flashbacks of her self-harm attempts.

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Technically, Crazxy is only about a desperate father driving a car. So when the film-making does decide to amplify the stakes, it’s a set piece so campy that it’s hypnotic to watch: a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere, atmospheric windmill shots, a risky surgery being conducted on a video call, a missing bolt and an off-screen epileptic attack. The scene leaves nothing off the table in terms of tension-building and release. At one point, it’s as if Abhimanyu is condensing lost years of suffering — as a parent, a surgeon, a mentor, a human — into a few minutes of multi-tasking chaos. He’s making up for lost time through this obstacle course. The surgery might seem like a stretch, but it exists as a clumsy metaphor for jumpstarting a dead heart. Of course this is spelt out as a voice-flash in the end, but I’m going to pretend that I’d have figured it out anyway.

Shah commits to the tireless (or tyre-less) pressure that Abhimanyu is under. So much of his performance is just doing and thinking, and hoping that the rest of the film is an extension of his mind. He functions like driving this car is muscle memory, but being selfless is not. At some level, he feels like a man that’s subconsciously punishing himself for the man he was. It’s a skilful and bodily turn, not least because he recognises the irony of being the central character of a story that exposes how Abhimanyu abandoned other stories. You don’t exactly root for a dad to rescue his daughter. But you root for him to realise that he’s in a survival drama where the only threat he must survive is himself. That Crazxy manages to convey this — even in hindsight — is a testament to its shoestring idea and big-budget emotions. Don’t bother trying to pronounce the title (I tried and the result was “Craz-sexy”); it’s as difficult as expecting a modern thriller to unfold without a provocative twist. The movie gods must be crazxy.