Apurva: Tara Sutaria's Survivor Film Should Not Have Survived

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NIKHIL NAGESH BHAT’s Apurva is a survival drama that should not have survived. It should not have survived the ideation stage and definitely should not have survived the execution stage. The film is so sluggish even at a runtime of 95 minutes that describing it using easy qualifiers like “bad” or “terrible” does not cut it. For all intents and purposes, Bhat’s outing is unnecessary, and in an ideal world, we would not have to sit through and summon up thoughts about it. But we don’t live in one and it is agonising.

The review could end here and it wouldn’t matter — Bhat’s film is that inconsequential. Broadly put, it is a survival thriller where a woman is kidnapped by a bunch of dacoits from Chambal, and the way her resilience shines through in the face of the crisis forms the crux of the story. It is not so much the plot which is the problem but the way Bhat, who recently directed the much-hyped non-stop actioner Kill, looks at the specifics that is worrying. He is so out of depth in his understanding of the world he has created and the lead he has chosen, that in his hands, the idea of suffering and retaliation are dialed up to grotesque heights in the hope of making an impact. There is a particular scene when Rajpal Yadav’s character (who is one of the goons) unhooks Apurva’s kurti and slides his hands underneath. The moment lasts for a few seconds but the distasteful treatment makes one recoil. It is one thing to be a bad film and entirely another thing to be unwatchable.

The story is this: Apurva (a woefully miscast Tara Sutaria), a student in Delhi, plans to surprise her banker fiancé (Dhairya Karwa) on his birthday. On the way, her bus is attacked by an armed gang of bandits. They are a group of four and one of them (Abhishek Banerjee) notices her and takes her hostage. The film unfolds in that one night when Apurva defends herself against them, fuelled by rage. If this brings to mind Navdeep Singh’s 2015 film, NH10, the comparison would not be amiss. The premise of Singh’s outing, not unlike Bhat’s film, made a compelling case for female rage and bravery.

However, Apurva is not just inferior in all departments but also in its fundamental understanding of the emotions it wants to convey. If NH10 recognised fearlessness as the fullness of fear and not the absence of it, proposing through its protagonist that one is truly fearless when one is too afraid to be afraid anymore, Apurva depicts it as a disjunctive state, independent of fear entirely. In the film, the lead character is first scared, then angry, and finally retaliates as if all these sentiments are beats she has to go through. At some point in the night, Apurva looks up and there, she is a different person as she rages on with a sickle ready to kill anyone.

The potential of what can happen when a woman steps out of her guarded surroundings is infinite. This is not just because the things that can happen to her are unimaginable but also because the ways she can retaliate is hardly comprehended. Bhat takes this and stumps it to the ground, crafting a film that unfolds in one night but possesses neither the stylistic flourish to engage an audience nor the narrative chops to comprehend the plight it wants to denote. In the midst, there is a bonkers subplot of an astrologer that is as believable as the proposition of Tara Sutaria living in Gwalior, or Sutaria’s character wearing heavy bangles and running in the desert and still not getting caught, or characters pelting stones at each other in the dark and not missing the target. All of these things happen in the film and we are supposed to buy them. To reiterate: not all survivor films need to survive.

Stream Apurva here. 

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of OTTplay. The author is solely responsible for any claims arising out of the content of this column.)