October

*ing: Varun Dhawan, Banita Sandhu

Rated: 6/10

October is a good and thoughtful movie which sadly few will watch or enjoy. Director Soojit Sarkar and writer Juhi Chaturvedi have come up with gems, all more extra than ordinary. This one, too, is in the same category.

October skillfully makes a virtue of monotony on screen. Sarkar makes it interesting enough for you to sit through a staccato office-to-hospital-to-office-to-hospital movie weaving a moving romance where there is none.

Varun Dhawan as the well meaning but lazy hotel management student trying to shirk work with regularity is in a very different role in this one. No buffoonery, no OTT characterisation, no comic relief, nothing to denote the David Dhawan type of screen persona.

Just a regular guy who lives a regular life, so regular that he is not even madly in love with the girl who’s medical condition he gets obsessed with, spending days and nights in hospital after she falls from the third floor of the hotel and goes into coma and a vegetative state thereafter.

Life’s hidden lessons unfold slowly but surely as Dhawan tries to find out why did the girl ask where he was just before falling off the ledge. Just a run of the mill query to friends, nothing more but that takes Varun (Dan) and the movie along to its inevitable climax.

Sarkar’s cinematic brilliance comes across in the fact that he manages to evince audience interest in a stuck up and hopeless situation without any movement. Banita Sandu (Shiuli) who vegetates on the hospital bed for ions is excellent with her haunting eyes, showcasing the comatose state with a stunning lack of expressions. Her vacant eyes speak volumes throughout the film. Gitanjali Rao as an IIT Delhi professor and mother of the Shiuli takes centrestage whenever she visits the screen with her silent despair, ravages of hospital costs and the emotions that beset her in the face of her daughter’s predicament.

Sarkar encases hopelessness with a lot of promise. Unfortunately, there are very few takers for such negativity. 

Source: The Sunday Pioneer, 15 April, 2018