Kahaani 2: Durga Rani Singh: Predictability is the killer

Cast : Arjun Rampal, Vidya Balan, Naisha Khanna, Jugal Hansraj

Rated: 5/10

Kahaani 2… is not a patch on Kahaani — in any which way, except for Vidya Balan. She is as brilliant and as solid as ever, this time as Durga Rani Singh.

From playing a pregnant woman in search of her missing husband in Kahaani, to the complicated plain Jane on a quest to save a child abuse victim in this one, she leaves no frame empty, emoting a range that seldom sits comfortably on one person. Yes, she is the central character as she is meant to be. And yes, she does justice to this pride of place given to her in most of her movies, be it The Dirty Picture, Hamari Adhuri Kahani or Kahaani 2.

But even she fails to enrich Kahaani 2 simply because the all round predictability of this Sujoy Ghosh thriller kills it quite summarily. Kahaani was a treat, what with the suspense killing the audience instead of the film, till the every end and then climaxing into a high that is uncommon on the Indian screen.

Kahaani 2 does nothing of the sort. We know it all from the beginning — we know the end, we know how and why the characters are in the situations they are in, we know where the situations are leading. To know all the whys and the what-next in a thriller is like trying to find thrills in navigating a well-lit tunnel. The only surprise element in Kahaani 2 is that it has no twists, no turns and no mystery whatsoever. It is just a stand-alone story of a woman first trying to save a child abuse victim from an influential family in Kalimpong and then paying the price for it in Chandan Nagar.

Ghosh should not have named this one Kahaani 2 when his intention was so far removed from carrying forward the legacy of the original. The sepia-shaded West Bengal ambience and all the effort by Vidya fail to salvage this tight-framed but predictable thriller in which Arjun Rampal is a cop on a trail with most answers falling in place even before he picks up the gun or pulls up his socks. Perhaps, Ghosh’s third Kahaani will not be so un-cool in the mystery segment. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, December 4, 2016