Daayra movie review: Prithviraj impresses, film doesn’t know what to do with Kareena Kapoor

Daayra movie review: The Meghna Gulzar’s film stars Kareena Kapoor-Prithviraj in the lead roles.

Daayra movie review: In some of her better films, Meghna Gulzar’s determined wading into morally complex territory has left us questioning our beliefs about right and wrong. Her best work remains Talvar, in which the murder of a 14 year girl laid bare the hypocrisies in the way we judge young adolescents and parenting, which neatly carved out the pro-and-anti maxxers: the questions swirling around the murder still haunts us.

In Daayra, the director attempts to take the discomfort several notches higher. The plot appears to have been based on the killing of four Hyderabad men who were taken to the spot where they had allegedly raped and killed a young woman. Meant to be a re-creation of the crime, it ended up in the deaths of all the suspects.

DCP Ajooni Kohli (Kareena Kapoor Khan) and her team are assigned to investigate fellow cop DCP Raman Kumar (Prithiviraj Sukumaran) and his colleagues over a similar incident. The film positions itself as a police procedural with parallel investigations, in which the girl’s devastated mother (Kshiti Jog) recounts just how her daughter (Pragati Mishra) happened to have been caught in a deserted stretch of road, at the mercy of predators who roam the night.

Given the source material, and the way encounter specialists have been treated as heroes by our movies (remember Ab Tak Chappan?), I was hoping for a powerful film which would examine the troubling aspect of the upholders of law who take it into their own hands, as it goes about excavating the whys and wherefores of the crime: the apathetic cops who refuse to listen to the mother and brother when they arrive at the police station to file a missing person complaint, and the horrific end of that person, which shakes you even when the camera stays at a respectful distance.

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But this time around, the result is disappointing, the matter-of-factness in the telling coming off more as dryness: it’s one thing to examine the innards of an ‘encounter’ killing, and quite another to position yourself quite so ambiguously around its legality.

Of the cast, Prithviraj comes off best of the lot, in a contained but effective performance, along with Jitendra Joshi and Trupti Khamkar, as junior colleagues who know exactly how to catch a fleeing criminal. Kapoor Khan may well have been in a different film, which never quite knows how to position her, as a star or a character playing a part. And, spoiler alert, the two biggest assets of the film are brought face-to-face in their own encounter which is so brief, with such little pay-off: if this was meant to be a climactic high-point, it certainly doesn’t land.

Are we really at the point of soft-soaping legal vigilante-ism? Then we are not just on a slippery slope; we are well past it.

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Daayra movie cast: Kareena Kapoor Khan, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Jitendra Joshi, Kshiti Jog, Trupti Khamkar, Pragati Mishra, Biswapati Sarkar, Kanwaljit Singh, Achint Kaur
Daayra movie director: Meghna Gulzar
Daayra movie rating: 2 stars