Director: Ranjit M. Tewari
Writer: Aseem Arrora
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Rakul Preet Singh, Chandrachur Singh, Hrishitaa Bhatt, Sargun Mehta, Sujith Shankar
The good news is that Cuttputlli is a low-key whodunit starring Akshay Kumar. There is no social message, no lavishly-scaled set pieces, no preaching, no flag. Kumar is a cop and he must hunt down a serial killer. Simple. He has only one weak moment, when his character instinctively bends down to tie the shoelaces of a pregnant stranger. But that’s about it. The bad news is that Cuttputlli is not a good film at all. It’s yet another dated, overlong and clunky hill-station thriller with a climax whose twist is that it isn’t actually a twist. The narrative lacks rhythm, and the suspense feels like a smokescreen for events barely related to the setting.
A remake of the 2018 Tamil hit Ratsasan, Cuttputlli unfolds in a strangely non-misty Himachal Pradesh. Kumar plays 36-year-old Arjan Sethi, an aspiring filmmaker (“with a diploma in criminal psychology”) who joins the police force after his serial-killer scripts are rejected by Punjabi producers. “Put some comedy in it,” says one of them unironically, even as Arjan’s Alzheimer’s-afflicted neighbour is mined for cheap laughs: Every time the old man is reminded that his wife is dead, he celebrates. (Rakul Preet Singh is soon introduced as a teacher who mistakes Arjan to be the father of his 15-year-old niece – “too young to be a dad,” she remarks, before proceeding to scold him). Naturally, Arjan’s years of research on psychopaths will come in handy as a cop. Silly me for suspecting that maybe Arjan has gone all method to make an award-winning true-crime documentary about what happens next. When a serial killer starts to target teenage girls, leaving mutilated dolls behind at the crime scene, the only evidence of Arjan’s ex-career is that his theories keep getting rejected by senior officers. Unless you count a song featuring him dancing with his lady love at an airport in clothes that are colour-coordinated with the planes behind him.
The thing about mediocre murder mysteries is that we often mistake (morbid) curiosity for engagement. A story that opens with a question – like, say, a dead body – knows that no matter what it does now, the viewer will wait for an answer. It’s human nature. The nation wants to know. Movies like Cuttputlli then become the cinematic equivalent of a clickbaity piece whose title screams out “You won’t believe what happens next!”. You click on it anyway, get blinded by the typos and, worst of all, you believe what happens next because it’s totally random. For instance, Cuttputlli has a bunch of red herrings. One of them – a predatory character introduced midway through the film – is too self-conscious. His scenes are shot so crudely that the eventual killer almost looks mild in comparison. Another red herring is smarter, because it plays on our notions of disposable faces in male-dominated Hindi movies. It’s probably not even deliberate, but I’ll take anything at this point. The treatment remains clumsy, though, and there’s always a sense that the story is just biding its time.
Kumar is pleasantly subdued as Arjan, especially in comparison to his recent roles. But that’s not to say it’s a performance capable of saving the film from itself. The production value belongs to the Nineties, as does the jarring arrogance of the senior officers. They’re presented as exceedingly daft characters only so that Arjan looks sincere and smart. Arjan’s sister and brother-in-law (who is also a cop) conveniently disappear before the third act despite driving his arc. A plot point centred on a hearing aid and piano tune is the sort of thing I used to write in seventh grade after watching too many Scooby-Doo cartoons.
When the killer is finally revealed, it feels like cheating. Every rule of the genre is broken, and not in a nice way. It’s like watching the mangled wreckage of an accident between another Himalayan whodunit and Cuttputlli. Maybe it made more sense in the Tamil original, or maybe it was executed better. I’m all for hitting the viewer with left-of-field twists. But the truth can’t be so concealed that even the film forgets about it. All I can say is that Arjan did not stage the whole thing as material for his next script. (If he had, he’d be an Anurag Kashyap hero). The good news is that the ending of Cuttputlli is not as absurd as the ending of the recent Forensic – a serial-killer story that treats gender dysmorphia as a visual gimmick. The bad news is that it’s in a league of its own.
Cuttputtli is available to stream on Disney+ Hotstar.
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