‘Vadh 2’ Movie Review: A Decent Sequel, A Poignant Crime Drama

The opening minutes of Vadh 2 feature a surprisingly tender moment. It’s past midnight in a prison complex in the wilderness of Madhya Pradesh. A wall separates the female and male wards. Manju Singh (Neena Gupta), a senior inmate of 28 years, sits on one side of the wall and chats with Shambunath Mishra (Sanjay Mishra), a long-time constable, from the other side. It’s a ‘blind’ date of sorts; they can’t see each other, but it’s a routine etched from decades of familiarity (he’s the official bootlegger) and friendship (her friends refer to him as her “aashiq”). Under the stars, they discuss each other’s life now. Her term is ending and she doesn’t want to leave; he speaks of loneliness and offers her a bottle on his birthday. You feel for the old ‘couple’: united by shackles, divided by freedom. They could be a film on their own. One of the merits of Vadh 2 is that it never loses sight of this little film. It’s a moment that echoes across a story that keeps expanding: a moment that keeps reclaiming the eyes of companionship from the jaws of a crime thriller.

Shambunath and Manju are cogs in a larger wheel. The other players emerge. Her impending release coincides with the arrival of a grumpy new jailer, SI Prakash Singh (Kumud Mishra); he’s a casteist officer who treats subordinates according to their surnames, also threatening to end the casually corrupt ways of the place (“this is a jail, not a hotel”). There’s Manju (Shilpa Shukla), the shady warden of the women, whose side hustle is providing fresh recruits to one of the more influential male prisoners. There’s this influential prisoner, Keshav (Akshay Dogra), a monster who enjoys unchecked power and privilege; he kills puppies for fun — quite literally — and rules over the barracks like a debauched king. Masculinity comes into play when Keshav locks horns with Prakash Singh, the new boss who’s out to mark his territory. And there’s 22-year-old Naina (Yogita Bihani), the latest inmate in the crosshairs of the predator.

Vadh 2 works on two levels. First, as an isolated investigative thriller: where ideas of justice and karma collide in a country that’s wired to seek salvation through its fictions. Systemic rot has long been the cornerstone of the rape-and-revenge stories. This film does well to cushion the theme with some humanity and stakes. That a ‘whodunit’ unfolds in a prison — the one space that’s supposed to hold and rehabilitate — reveals a culture of complicity that cuts across uniforms and identities. The laws simply blur the lines between victimhood and oppression. I like the buildup, even if the editing (those abrupt cut-to-black transitions) and score tend to overcook the tension. For instance, early on we see a character’s routine in grave detail. This government servant’s side hustle is growing veggies on the property and selling them in the market — he packs them up in his cart every night, banters with the guards, and stores them in a giant freezer in his modest quarters. The ‘weapons’ are established; the foreshadowing of the crime is visual.

When such movies begin, the viewer’s attention is often heightened, so the screenplay toys with this alertness. We know who’s going to die and who will kill, but it’s the how and the why that we are led to think about. The prison dynamics are visibly shaped by the most famous title in the genre, The Shawshank Redemption: the life-sentenced inmate about to leave, a bigoted jailer, the conditional camaraderie between both sides, a backstory of innocence framed. The morality of murder aside, I also like that the suspense is crafted through a series of morally ambiguous characters. SI Prakash Singh enters as the quintessential villain, but we are suddenly invited to root for him when he squares off against the badder villain. We also find ourselves rooting for him when the visiting investigating officer, Ateet Singh (Amitt K. Singh), goes around interrogating people and threatens to expose a conspiracy — a conspiracy that might have led to a greater good.

At many points, the film teases our perceptions of such templates. The fact that everyone seems to be involved in a coverup makes us see each of them in a different light. Whether it’s the Muslim constable who sucked up to Keshav or the female warden who gets increasingly wary of him, the film creates an illusion of a dysfunctional family that must withstand external pressure. If everyone is on one team, it’s the wily outsider who becomes the antagonist by default. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes one to slay a demon too. All through, it’s the opening of the film — it chooses to open with the life of one character — that hints at the real protagonist. The film introduces a sense of community in the motive, almost as if it’s purposely reflecting the biases and black-or-white ways of the investigator. He sees what he wants to see, until a second half that cleverly deconstructs the incident through progressing perspectives: like a relay race where the baton is passed by those in need to those in deed. The exposition is nicely designed — a rarity in mainstream Hindi cinema — and woven into Ateet Singh’s search in small installments.

From the supporting cast, I particularly liked Kumud Mishra’s Prakash and Amitt K. Singh’s Ateet. The two actors walk the thin line between heroes and antiheroes, constantly feeding into our notions of how a cat-and-mouse game stages human values. Both of them are good by virtue of wanting to do their jobs well, but they also have the main character energy of men with prison-sized egos. The beauty of Sanjay Mishra and Neena Gupta, as officer and inmate, is that they play primary characters posing as secondary characters. They make up for in lived-in language and antiquated chemistry what they lack in screen-time. Gupta nails the role of a woman anxious to step into the real world after the cocoon of a life sentence; you’d imagine she would do anything to stay inside, yet the film resists the gimmick in favour of a more human arc. Mishra’s inimitable comic timing — where he seems to just be mumbling things on the go and making it work — supplies the conceit within the setting. There’s also a softness about him here that stems from a career of ‘performing’. Even the way he drinks in the film doesn’t feel like the dramatic alcohol-as-coping-mechanism habit; he drinks like someone who enjoys the buzz, not someone trying to numb his pain.

Remarkably, Vadh 2 works at a second level that makes it easier to process the truth of these performances. The film is a spiritual sequel to Vadh (2022), a sleeper hit that revolved around a lower-middle-class couple at the mercy of a loan shark. Mishra and Gupta played teacher Shambunath and housewife Manju in the film; he ends up committing a ‘crime’ — and trying to cover it up — after the lecherous goon preys on a student named Naina. There’s also a corrupt officer and an MLA in the mix. The comparisons to the Drishyam franchise suggested that perhaps the sequel might be a continuation of the couple’s story. But Vadh 2 does the smarter thing of retaining only the character names and lead actors in a parallel-universe sort of way. This is commercially more viable, of course, in that the audience doesn’t have to watch the first film to join any dots. But the shadow does loom large; the easter eggs are worth engaging with. In that tender conversation under the stars, Manju asks Shambunath about his life — his backstory reframes the man from Vadh (including an ungrateful son who left him in debt) as a widower. He may not be the teacher, she may not be his wife, but perhaps that’s the life they are striving for.

What this same-but-different tone does is allow the sequel to make a few pointed alterations and improve on the original. The message might be similar, but the treatment has more layers. It plays with our reading of the corrupt cop this time (extrapolating him into two men), while adjusting the gender politics of the story. A crisis that threatened to tear the married couple apart in the first film is something that triggers their togetherness in this one. The film-making also shows restraint in the way it handles human relationships. Except for the one-note villain (who is blatantly evil so that his ‘Vadh’ is ethically justified), nobody is overtly good or bad; everyone is a survivalist in a place that has no time for broad strokes. It resists the temptation to play up the ‘comedy’ of Shambu being in love with Manju: no gags, no cartoonish sound cues, no goofy dialogue. It also doesn’t play up the bond between Naina and her saviours either; there are no sweet montages of how she’s adopted by the seniors. It trusts the viewer to understand the darkness without seeing the light that precedes it. When it happens, it’s more of a crime of anti-passion: sudden, impulsive, feral, defensive even.

The commentary of this franchise might be far from subtle — a bit problematic even — but the film-making is polished enough to sell the rage. There’s conviction in its motifs of fairness and catharsis, even if the threads are tied together too conveniently in the end. The volume is high, but it doesn’t succumb to masala-movie tropes for the sake of accessibility. And sometimes, what a film doesn’t do defines its intent more than what it does. Despite the violent genre staples, Vadh 2 still manages to remain about an elderly couple hoping to overcome societal rejection and ride that last bus into the sunset. The duality of the title (Vadh, meaning “execution”) comes into play. It’s not death that it refers to. The film executes — and engineers — a future only for those who deserve one. In the words of an iconic movie inmate: hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.