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 There’s an expression in liter­ary circles called the “writ­ers’ writer”. This is someone whose work is highly admired/ talked about among other writers and yet he/she may be relatively unknown to the general public. The same expression can be bor­rowed in the case of films, and for directors in particular. Speak­ing of modern Hindi cinema, one director who deserves the label of “directors’ director” is Sriram Raghavan, the 55-year-old writer/ director of thrillers. His works enjoy cult following among aspir­ing filmmakers and film nerds but he has never been able to bask in global fame like Anurag Kashyap, nor is he much-talked about like Vishal Bhardhwaj, Dibakar Baner­jee or Neeraj Pandey. Raghavan’s limited appeal owes to his sticking to his niche of thriller/ suspense. With the exception of the spy-thriller ‘Agent Vinod’, all of his films seem to take place in the same world, where ordinary lives are thrown asunder by macabre crimes and moral decay. Two of his films —‘Ek Hasina Thi’ and ‘Bad­lapur’—are revenge flicks. And the cult favorite ‘Johnny Gaddaar’ is a racy pulp thriller about a man who digs himself a rabbit hole as he tries to conceal his crimes.

His latest film ‘Andhadhun’ (styl­ized as AndhaDhun) is filled with his trademark touches and I am happy to report that it’s a supe­rior companion piece to ‘Johnny Gaddaar’, in the sense that it’s a plot-driven film thriving on slow and naturally built taut moments. The film does not bother about fabricating suspense through mys­tery and the structure isn’t that of a whodunit. The audience is rather allowed to play God.

Raghavan understands that if viewers know everything about the characters while the characters know nothing about each other, it makes for a more participative viewing. We hold their secrets and have a larger context to feel amused or scared, even when these characters exhibit most ordi­nary of gestures.

The film’s title can be inter­preted in two ways. Literally, it translates as ‘reckless’ or ‘rash’, and figuratively it means a ‘blind tune’. It’s a clever title to a story that blends both these elements. We have a blind pianist (Ayush­mann Khurrana) whose talent makes him a novelty at a Mumbai bar. Things look bright for him: he has a budding romance with the bar-owner (Radhika Apte), and he hopes to put together enough money to strike it big in London. Then, one eventful day, in search of extra cash he knocks the door of an apartment belonging to a washed-up Bolly­wood actor of the 70s (Anil Dha­wan), who wants the pianist to play a private concert for him and his wife (Tabu) on their marriage anni­versary. But the day that promised a gentle, jazz-filled romantic cele­bration shifts to an uncomfortable and nervous frenzy.

Raghavan orchestrates the film like a seasoned music conductor. He begins at a leisurely pace, put­ting Khurrana’s reputation as the Hugh Grant of Hindi small-town romantic comedies to good use. The opening plays out like a fluffy, breezy romantic comedy. As the normalcy settles in, he instantly disrupts it with a gut-wrenching punch. This contrast escalates in intensity and events pile up and the director pumps his composition with a shot of nervous energy and unpredictability.

Khurrana’s performance helps the protagonist remain likeable even when he ventures into anti-hero territory. He softens and hardens believably, and keeps his morality intact. His transforma­tion is not as pessimistic as that of protagonists in Raghavan’s ear­lier films. Likewise, Tabu pulls off different shades of her character: as a noir-ish seductress, grieving wife and a master manipulator. She’s downright sympathetic and also genuinely scary. Radhika Apte is in a short but effective role. Other actors like Anil Dhawan, Manav Vij, Zakir Hussain, Chhaya Kadam and Ashwini Kalsekar are all given their own moments and dialogues to shine.

‘Andhadhun’ is proof that nobody knows how to spin the thriller genre better than Sriram Raghavan. The film not only has the marks of a mas­ter storyteller but also of a serious fanboy who injects 80s Bollywood nostalgia with the sensibilities of classic American and European films from Alfred Hitchcock and Louis Malle. I personally hope ‘Andhadhun’ succeeds in giving Sriram Raghavan the recognition he duly deserves.

It’s ironic how a film with an overarching title like ‘Katha Kathmandu’ turns out to be an anthology of loosely connected trivialities that is utterly unrepresentative of the spirit of Kathmandu. Author and TV producer Sangita Shrestha, who directs this film, tries to stitch together three stories with thematic fabrics of lust, love and life. But her lens is so shallow and detached from social consciousness that she ends up looking at Kathmandu and its people from a single dimension, inspired as she is, more by mainstream movies than real life.

These three stories feature a super-model (Priyanka Karki) exploited by her drug-dealer boyfriend (Pramod Agrahari), a teenage college romance between a college hottie (Sandhya KC) and a geek (Sanjog Koirala), and two terminally-ill heart patients (Prekshya Adhikari and Ayushman Joshi), who, at the cusp of death, don’t fail to cash in on little moments of joy.

All three are blends of broad-stroke characters and situations we’ve already seen in so many popular movies before. The darker side of the fashion world, filled with promiscuous models and lecherous men, made me feel as if I had walked into a Madhur Bhandarkar film. Also, the track of budding romance amid illness reeks of ‘The Fault in Our Stars’. Writer-director Shrestha never subverts these familiarities and plays them out predictably. She carries a very generalist assumption of drug addicts, making her actors rub their noses constantly. Other stereotypes are also played up. One character wears big frames and has a forced stammer just to look socially awkward and enough to make Rohit Mehra from ‘Koi Mil Gaya’ feel proud.

The film’s writing doesn’t do any favors to the actors. Characters are painted either black or white. Pramod Agrahari tears into his sadistic role with one-note intensity. Priyanka Karki is too zoned out in the role of a victim, who gets thrashed around by both Agrahari’s character and Sangita Shrestha’s conceited plot tricks, employed throughout to gain shock value. Shrestha fails to recognize that to land a good payoff you first need a good setup. The performances from young actors Sandhya KC, Sanjog Koirala, Ayushman Joshi and Prekshya Adhikari aren’t worthy enough to make viewers care about them.

At many points in ‘Katha Kathmandu’ characters will vent their anger at Kathmandu for crushing their dreams and thrusting their lives into a whirlwind of misery. These outbursts barely make us care about them or to relate their struggle to the contemporary mood and culture of modern Kathmandu. The film’s stilted in its glossy design and flat cinematic aesthetics. Lujaw Singh’s camerawork lacks the poignancy to capture the city’s texture. We stay mainly indoors: in brightly-lit clean apartments, expensive looking colleges and hospitals.

‘Katha Kathmandu’ has come one week after ‘Intu Mintu Londonma’, a film that also had a female director (Renesha Rai Bantawa). Although ‘Katha Kathmandu’ has slightly better performances, both films’ central shortcoming is the same: They are more produced than directed. They adhere strictly to the trendy filmmaking conventions. Money is poured to create lavish and rich looking production design, but what about the content? With their films, Rai and Shrestha have added no new dimension that could’ve questioned the status quo of Nepali films. Their initial efforts have turned out to be so bland that it will be difficult to keep a keen interest in what they have to offer in the coming days.

 As you sit in the pitch-dark hall of the Sarwanam Theater to watch “Janayudha Jari Cha?” you do not know what exactly to anticipate. But rest assured, this play will meet all your expectations. You will do well to closely watch. The actors are not just on the stage; they may, in the middle of an act, flood towards the audience, making the audience feel as if they are in a battlefield, first-hand witness of the decade-long Maoist rebellion. When the play starts, you get a sense that a lot of energy has gone into it. Everything looks well planned—the actors, stage decoration, and props.

At certain points, you even get goose­bumps, looking at the fantastic stage choreography, the ominous build-up to a climax or sharp dialogue delivery. “We spent five months just practicing. Three months we spent on outdoor training,” reveals Raj Shah, the writer, director and an actor of “Janayudha Jari Cha?”

In just an hour “Janayudha Jari Cha?” successfully shows you how young and patriotic Nepalis fought for their beliefs, the struggles they faced when leaving their families to join the revolu­tion, the pain they felt when they killed someone or when someone they knew died and how, at the end, they felt the sacrifices they made were for nothing as they did not really get what they aimed for—a better Nepal. Shah wrote the play as a homage to the young who died for a cause believed in. “I just want to do justice to the fighters who gave their all for the country,” Shah says. The play will be staged at 5:15 pm every day till October 7 (except on Thursdays) at Sarwanam Theater, Kalikasthan.

‘Intu Mintu Londonma’ is true to the spirit of the playground rhyme that inspired its title. The romantic drama basically imagines a make-believe childlike world and just like the rhyme, makes no sense at all. We get por­celains as protagonists in Ishan aka Intu and Meera aka Mintu, who mostly act cute and funny but their conversation is neither interesting nor memorable. Whatever they talk and emote, is so dull and irrel­evant that watching them is akin to spending time babysitting two annoying five-year-olds.

London-based Ishan (Dhiraj Magar) meets Meera (Samragyee RL Shah), the daughter of Nepal’s Ambassador to the UK, at a pub where he plays with his band and also works as a manager. After they are introduced by a common friend, Ishan casually points out to Meera that they have the same coat. Meera gets offended. Later when she sees Ishan put a Nepali topi on an ex-Gurkha patron, she smiles at him, hinting maybe she’s into nationalist dudes and not into someone who wants to elbow in by saying ‘same pinch’. I don’t know.

They meet again, this time on a train when Meera overhears some­one singing in Nepali. She follows the voice and finds Ishan. Their romance builds over a weekend of sanitized hiking and sightseeing. Next morning they go their sepa­rate ways. They lose contact only to meet yet again at a mutual friend’s wedding. The lapse in communica­tion in between their weekend trip and the friend’s wedding is never cleared. Nevertheless, they restart from where they had left.

Soon, Meera’s father (played by journo Dil Bhushan Pathak) gets wind of their closeness. He doesn’t approve of Ishan and to keep from things going south, abruptly announces Meera’s engagement to Major Akash (Saruk Tamrakar) of Nepal Army, son of a close family friend, and takes his daughter to Nepal. The rest of the film takes place in Nepal with the backdrop of Meera’s wedding, where she’s conflicted between choosing her own life partner or the one chosen by her family.

Seasoned choreographer Rene­sha Rai Bantawa, in what is her first directorial venture, outshines in production design and dance. There is too much opulence at offer. Characters are dressed like runway models and Sailendra D. Karki’s cinematography doesn’t shy away to capture the London’s postcard perfect locations. But as one tries to look at the film beyond its cosmetic glare, Rai’s direction falls flat. From her inability to make her young actors internalize their characters to mishandling of dra­matic scenes, she still has to evolve as a storyteller.

The central performances from newcomer Dhiraj Magar and Sam­ragyee RL Shah are poorer than the material at hand. Magar has that Joseph Gordon-Levitt boyishness about him but his pleasing looks is unable to cover up his lacklus­ter acting. His co-star, Shah, on the other hand, is six films older and still finding it hard to peel off her pin-up girl image. It’s time she overhauled her career graph and started looking for projects that would make her come out of the world of bubblegum romances. And Saruk Tamrakar, who makes an abrupt entry post-interval, maintains a stiff body posture to appear like an army man.

‘Intu Mintu Londonma’ is a close relative of ‘Kaira’ and ‘Lilly Billy’ that released earlier this year. These films might have been shot abroad and much care given to make their actors look pretty, yet the story engine is second-rate and rusty. Even with modest commer­cial success, if the Nepali main­stream romantic films keep deliv­ering such disappointments, the viewers would soon stop showing any interest in the genre.