A Death in the Gunj: Different but slow
Rated: 5/10
Death in the Gunj is more about life in the back-belly of Jharkhand-West Bengal than about a sinister murder which the title speaks of.
Nevertheless, the film surprises you on many fronts, and pleasantly so sometimes. For a murder mystery which you think it is, it is much too old world and languid, merely sharing some happy, some tricky, some complicated, some simple moments of a Bengali family’s New Year eve get-together in a remote village house where the parents have chosen to retire despite the concern of their big city children.
Those moments are no doubt real, happening and carefully constructed to bite into the realism of a typical modern Bengali family. There is an extra-marital affair thrown in between a brash Ranvir Shourey and a beautiful western beauty in Kalki Koechlin. There is a dejected cousin, a run-of-the-mill couple with a precocious daughter, there are some un-fleshed schooltime buddies who come in to clink the glasses and then there are Tanuja as mom and Om Puri (has since passed unexpectedly) as father.
Both, one must say, fail to do justice to their roles as the roles assigned to them are half-baked, one of those side dishes that the director serves merely to enhance what he is trying to tell you. There’s planchette too and the invoking of a ghost who appears, or so I think, in the most unexpected of places in the film.
More of a story for an idle day than a real thriller, this one.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 4 June, 2017