Dhamaka: The Trailer Is Excruciatingly Edge-of-the-Seat

Dhamaka Trailer: When it comes to thrillers, Bollywood cinema  sucks. Just when Harry is about to explode Sally’s  valley,  out comes  a song or a comic break , or whatever. In brief,  Bollywood thrillers  don’t know  how to hold still.

 Going by the trailer I think Dhamaka , to stream on Netflix  from November  19, will be  a game-changer. It seems to be  a no-nonsense, zero-humbug  thriller. The set-up  for the plot is a bustling newsroom with   a bossy  CEO(the wonderful Amruta Subhash) .

 And  just a minor detail, but greatly  important  given  the  edge-of-the-seat  context, this is Kartik Aryan’s  first film with no songs…at least none  that I heard in the tense tactile  tormentingly  tapering trailer.

What I did  hear were bombs exploding . Did I tell you the trailer is, ha ha, explosive?

Kartik Aryan, lately open to new  challenges, plays Arjun Pathak. He is  one of those anything-for-TRPs journalists. And I can an understated suaveness  in  the  performance. He is  coping with  a terrorist who won’t stop at  anything and  a divorce proceeding simultaneously.

So when  a terrorist  with a Bihari accent named Raghuveer Mahto offers  him a  scoop that  he, Arjun, cannot  refuse, he doesn’t.

 This  is  a   cat-and-mouse game played at a steep octave. Luckily for us Ram Madhvani  is a director who knows  how to hold that pitch when it creeps up to a potentially shrill crescendo. Cleverly enough the trailer reveals more than it conceals. One of the biggest  mistakes the perpetrators  of  the  thriller genre make  in India  is to  play lukka chuppi with the audiences’ perceptions  in  the trailer.

 Not  this  time. Not  Dhamaka It tells  us exactly what’s happening  over there. There is a newshound  and a terrorist and  the two  are  positioned on  both sides  of  the  bridge on which stands Mumbai’s future relationship with terror attacks.

 Just  as  the future of thrillers in Bollywood depends to  a  large extent on whether Dhamaka delivers or not . From  the  look of it, we’ve got  an  outright winner here.