Arts, culture, entertainment and media
Daayra review: Why Mehgna Gulzar film starring Kareena, Prithviraj Sukumaran fails morality test
The film creates the illusion of moral ambiguity, presenting an ideological conflict between a police officer who believes in letting the law take its course and another who has no qualms in playing judge, jury, and executioner.
A morality tale with no moral compass of its own, Daayra continues director Meghna Gulzar’s creative spiral after Raazi (2018). That deeply humanist espionage drama is nearly a decade old, but instead of developing her style over time, Gulzar’s technical and thematic know-how appears to have disintegrated with each of the three features that she has directed since then. Like her breakout movie Talvar (2015), Daayra creates the illusion of moral ambiguity, but the film is built on a premise so fundamentally flawed that it’s never able to recover.
In Talvar — a Rashomon-style mystery about the infamous 2008 Noida double-murder case — Gulzar made her allegiances quite apparent after spending two hours playing it cool. In Daayra, on the other hand, the filmmaker stops short of condemning something that shouldn’t be up for debate in the first place.
Daayra presents an ideological conflict between a police officer who believes in letting the law take its course (Kareena Kapoor Khan) and another who has no qualms in playing judge, jury, and executioner (Prithviraj Sukumaran). As the saying goes, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Who guards the guards)?”
Daayra begins with an act of violence committed against a woman. It’s about time we moved on from this exploitative premise. A young woman, running an errand for her teenage brother, is kidnapped by a gang of drunk truck drivers, brutally assaulted, and set on fire on the side of a highway. Meanwhile, her mother and brother are made to run from pillar to post by a cop who refuses to register an FIR because he’s convinced the young woman has run away with her boyfriend.
The discovery of her brutalised body sends shockwaves across the country — though Daayra never identifies where the film is set. If anything, the movie goes to great lengths to remain vague on details.
