Island city: Soulless in Mumbai

Cast: Vinay Pathak, Tanishta Chatterjee, Ashwin Mushran

Rated: 5/10

The film is robotic and director Ruchika Oberoi has worked really hard to bring out this stuccato robotism in the film which pegs its scary drabness on three megapolis narratives.

She starts off with an IT company executive (played by Vinay Pathak) who is a human robot working through the day in such routine that it kills you seeing him. Oberoi brings out his crippling isolation in a soulless Mumbai teeming with people all around him. Forced by his company to go on a day’s vacation after winning the best employee award, he has to spend coupons in a mall and follow the orders of the fun and frolic committee. Buying soft toys, going on baby rides and being stuffed with home goodies (like a loofah), he performs the routine as a robot would, till there is a mix-up which gives him an assault rifle to become a killing machine (this too is on instruction). Till the shooting spree, Pathak’s story is flat but the tactic highlights the scariness of modern careers which have no life in their lives.

Then comes the best of the three stories in which a family’s angst with a dictatorial husband is brought out by two parallel stories — one spanning the comatose husband’s family and the other through a TV serial in which the man of the house is a paragon of virtue who keeps his family happy and together. The story suggests that such men exist only in imagination. Reality is that the man of the real home is best left in coma because that’s when the family enjoys life in his absence. By the time the third story starts you are in so much angst yourself that it gets too heavy on the mind. However, Ruchika Oberoi is a director to watch out.  

Source: Sunday Pioneer, September 4, 2016