Haseen Dillruba the new Netflix film which has Taapsee Pannu, Vikrant Massey and Harshvardhan Rane in it, is a romantic thriller that is neither romantic nor very thrilling. Needless to say, the actors who are so good at what they do, have just wasted their talent with their movie. As stated earlier, the movie is available on Netflix.
In fact, the movie doesn’t wait to get messy. In the first ten minutes itself, the scenes of this movie get way hectic and it would kind of make the audience crave for an interval. This surely isn’t the reaction that is desired. It can be simplified here, a guy dies, there’s a wedding, Kanika Dhillon gets an unconventionally flattering credit. And after all, this happening, the movie doesn’t get any better.
Now it is no secret that Netflix India ends up with bad films on almost a monthly basis, and this might be this month’s horror, but it should be out there that Haseen Dillruba has crossed the line for bad and has reached the worst. It is a cartoonish cautionary tale about the perils of arranged marriage and is so disappointing.
It can be argued that Hasen Dillruba is just a movie that has a bigger blot on star Taapsee Pannu’s post-Pink career than even Judwaa 2. Directed by Vinil Mathew, you know what you are going to see when you decide to watch this movie, but the trouble was that Haseen Dillruba has the nerve to promise something more meaningful, under the pretence of pulp thrills, it has aspirations for prestige.
The movie has not a single scene where the story is being delivered to the audience in a direct manner. While this to an extends is always appreciated, the excess is always not. As a result, the audience is going to get tired and crave that break. The film has a duration of two hours, but with the plot and scenes being so tiring, the two almost ends up feeling like four.
Three intensely unlikeable people come together in this strange cocktail of romance and revenge. Haseen Dilrba has not by any chance delivered what they had promised through their trailers. Even by the standards of something you might pick up on a railway platform, the characters in this film behave like no human being you’re ever likely to meet.
That being said, Taapsee Pannu’s character which depicts a bored housewife named Rani has no personality, the performance is all over the place. She starts off with her standard Taapsee Pannu style, brash but somewhat endearing, and then switches to a stunning off-brand, and keeps changing till it comes to a place where she literally begs a man to accept her. The shift is undoubtedly jarring, considering how Rani had been presented to us. The issue here isn’t the change of heart, we as the audience can accept such happenings, but the film’s indifference towards its own internal logic is somewhat annoying.
Normally, it is usually the writer and director who decide how and when the movie will slowly start the evolution of the character to keep the transition graceful. Not the actor. But because there’s no middle-ground between these drastically different sides to Rani’s personality, it feels as if you’re watching two entirely different people. Where’s the Taapsee who displayed such remarkable command over her character in Thappad? What has Haseen Dillruba done to her? Tonal creases like this can only be ironed out if the creative minds behind the operation are on the same page. It doesn’t seem like they were here.
Haseen Dillruba takes such a drastic swerve around the halfway mark that it never recovers. Although, in fairness, it was barely limping along before it decided to drive off a cliff. Everyone involved is capable of better. The movie is lacking in logic and hence the comment that it is just a waste of time and skill.
