Rating: ****
It is rare to come across a sequel that is better than the original, although Vadh 2 is not really a sequel to the 2022 film. The actors are the same and the rudimentary tenet remains unchanged: there is the legality and there is justice. Hopefully the two shall meet some day. Until then, some brave films such as this gambol over the issue, with a steady gaze and an unimpeachable value system even when some crucial rules from the books of the law are bypassed.
Strangely, justice never seemed more tenable. In the first Vadh film the elderly couple,played with streetwisdom and dignity by Neena Gupta and Sanjay Mishra, slayed an antisocial element who was…well,was getting on their nerves.
Things are just that bit more complicated in the second film.Gupta and Mishra have the same names Manju and Shambhunath . But they play characters different from the first part. She is a jail inmate, in prison for the murder of two young people whom she had no murderous links with.
As we all know, the process of courtroom redressal can be awfully messed up.
Into this messed-up procedure , Shambhunath , a lower-rank cop, wooes Manju through a hole in the prison’s stonewall, almost like a tunnel of hope, with desi daru and other sweet nothings. It’s a joy to see a couple beyond a certain age in the throes of an autumnal courtship.
Wish there was more of their life together as Man and Non-wife. But no. There is the business of justice.This time it is a chap so evil he makes the villain in the first Vadh film seem like a walkover.Keshav(played with curly-haired menace by Akshay Dogra) is so evil his introductory moment has him killing two puppies, just for fun.
Everyone is happy when Keshav disappears. From here the police procedural takes charge,and with such implacable surety,it all feels astonishingly organic and apt. The writing(by Jaspal Singh Sandhu) is tad superior to his direction. In execution—pun intended—the film falters at some crucial moments(Sanjay Mishra’s carted vegetable angle is over punctuated, not as smoothly done as the rest of the film). On the other hand, the prison sequences are shot with a deeply affecting dinginess.
In terms of the ceaseless squalidity of lives, Vadh is the other side of Karan Johar’s universe. Sapan Naruka’s probing camera weaves in and out of the prison atmosphere with suffocating vigour.There is particularly arresting(oops!) shot in the prison precinct when we see Neena Gupta, in a longshot, walking away with a jhola, looking like a forlorn cousin to Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. More than once, I wondered how the characters live in such wretched conditions, until the end when the location shifts to a scenic hillstation. It is here that I realized how much cleverer the writing is than is seems to be. The sense of fresh unpolluted air that we breathe at the end is liberating.
From its prison setting, Vadh moves into that liberating space, reminding us during the journey, that there is a yawning chasm between legal redress and justice, between surviving and celebrating life.
While the performances are uniformly addictive,special mention must be made of Kumud Mishra as a morally compromised casteist cop, and newcomer Amitt K Singh who not only seems to fit into the Khaki, but also seems to know what it entails.
And if that sounds mysterious, what to do? It is the nature of the beast.
