The Strange and the Twisted on OTT

Anthologies seem to be a snug fit for OTTs. The short format suits the digital medium and the Indian filmmaker gets to experiment with any story. It can be challenging to effectively narrate a tale in just 30 minutes but filmmakers in India seem to have taken to this genre in a big way, especially in the pandemic, and even manage to make it hard-hitting.

Take Oor Iravu, the short film from the Tamil anthology, Paava Kadhaigal, on honour killings, in which acclaimed director Vetrimaaran successfully conveys the chilling horror behind a father’s vengeful, mind-numbing plan to get back at his pregnant daughter for ruining the family’s name by marrying outside the community. The actors Sai Pallavi and Prakash Raj too played their part with unerring intensity leaving the viewer agitated and restless. Surely, that was the purpose.

Bollywood’s biggest production house, Karan Johar’s Dharmatic Entertainment, which had tied up with Netflix two years ago to jointly craft ‘universal content’, has come up with a new anthology offering this month titled Ajeeb Daastaans. Unlike Paava Kadhaigal, it does not revolve around a serious social evil. However, it teems with big stars, emotions, drama and sex. But unlike his films on celluloid, which are largely escapist fare, Ajeeb Daastaans, which will release on Netflix on April 16, is supposed to delve into fractured messy relationships, tapping into the twisted side in a person – laying bare how far a person can push their moral compass to gain something.

Obviously, on OTT you can push the envelope. Maybe, not for long what with new ‘soft’ regulations like platforms having to mandatorily self-classify content and put in parental locks and age verification mechanisms in place. But, commercial film director Shashank Khaitan of Dhadak fame, whose short Majnu features as one of the films in Ajeeb Daastaans, still finds OTT a creative platform. Dealing with “flawed, multi-dimensional characters and chasing imperfection” in Majnu has been so much more fun than making a straight-laced, fluffy Bollywood film, he said in a recent chat with the media.

Majnu features the talented Jaideep Ahlawat of Paatal Lok fame, who plays a powerful thug opposite Dangal girl Fatima Sheikh, a sultry temptress, who are caught up in a fraught emotional battle. Maybe, there is no vibrator scene here like in Johar’s earlier anthology, Lust Stories, which had stirred up some controversy but the three other directors helming Ajeeb Daastaans like Neeraj Ghagwan (Masaan), Raj Mehta (Good Newwz) and newbie Kayrouz Irani too claim they were able to go the full hog.

Director Ghagwan’s short Geeli Pucchi in this anthology in fact probes what seems like a lesbian relationship, played by the none other than the inimitable Konkana Sen Sharma and the winsome Aditi Rao Hydari, who long “for an emotional connection which they end up finding in one another”.

April seems to be a packed month for OTT platforms. If not Johar’s high-drama, salacious fare, two films of Malayalam cinema’s powerhouse actor Fahad Faasil have landed. There’s Irul, a whodunit, and Joji, a crime thriller directed by National Film Award director, Dileesh Pothan (his third outing with Faasil), inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Joji is gripping, it is a slow burn kind of film. Faasil is Joji, a good-for-nothing college dropout from a prosperous family with a sprawling rubber estate, who is grappling with extreme low self-esteem and self-loathing. Unable to fight it, he plots a cunning escape from his situation after his domineering father falls seriously ill. But guilt and more evil push him into a slimy, dark abyss from where he cannot claw back. The actor plays this role in a low-key manner, leaving his body language and expressions to do most of the talking. PN Sunny, who plays the brawny patriarch, Baburaj, as Joji’s alcoholic elder brother and Basil Joseph as the rebuffed priest are also brilliant.

Kannada superstar Puneeth Rajkumar’s new release Yuvarathnaa set in a college campus has landed on Amazon Prime this month just eight days after its theatre release, leaving exhibitors red-faced. But with COVID cases rising, many big films may just weave their way here. What will be high-stakes Kannada blockbuster KGF-2’s fate too?

Abhishek Bachchan’s The Big Bull, based on the life of infamous stock-broker Harshad Mehta, which released this week on Disney+Hotstar too was actually made for cinema. But it was tweaked to suit OTT and has turned out to be 8 hours and 41 minutes long. Not as powerful as the SonyLiv original, Scam 1992, the Harshad Mehta story, this may work for fans of diehard Bollywood masala movies.

Interestingly, good cinema too is betting big on OTT. Award-winning Marathi film director Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple, which has picked up accolades in international forums, will release on Netflix at the end of April. Though the director has expressed his happiness that the film will get a global audience on OTT, he however dubbed films skipping theatres as a loss for filmmakers and the public if “they don’t experience enough films on the big screen”.

The Disciple, follows the journey of a Hindustani classical vocalist’s struggles, dreams and artistic journey in contemporary Mumbai, and is said to have Tamhane’s signature deliberate and meditative pace.

Disney+Hotsar features an offbeat film, OK Computer, a futuristic science fiction fable produced by the talented Anand Gandhi (remember Ship of Theseus, an anthology film?). A self-driving car commits murder and a cyber-cop (played by Vijay Varma, a Bollywood actor who has notched up fame from OTT) and a robot rights activist (another OTT regular, Radhika Apte) team up to solve the murder. OK Computer explores how far we can trust artificial intelligence, of course with lot of dark humour thrown in. Some may find it bizarre but that is the way the film has been made.

The other Dangal girl, Sanya Malhotra too is garnering a lot of praise for Pagglait (on Netflix), for her restrained portrayal of a young girl who finds herself suddenly widowed. She has to weep for a man she never knew or who never loved her. It is a coming-of-age film where a small town girl (a hangover from Ranaut’s Queen) realises her own potential to stand on her own feet and not depend on marriage and a man. It gives you a sharp feel of small town India, a fact director Vishal Bhardwaj too acknowledged on Twitter when praising the film for being “nuanced”, added that it took him back to his Meerut days.

Going back to strange stories like the ones in Johar’s new anthology, there is a new series on Amazon Prime that will surely disturb you. That is a BBC One and Netflix co-production, a crime drama series, The Serpent. It is based on serial killer Vietnamese-Indian Frenchman Charles Sobhraj’s life, which has been the subject of biographies, documentaries and a Bollywood film with Randeep Hooda.

But The Serpent has picked up rave reviews for realistically bringing the hippie era of the 1970s and ’80s to life. It is a chilling watch, as a smooth, psychopathic Sobhraj befriends young, happy-go-lucky American and Dutch hippies, drugs, robs and then cold-bloodedly murders them. That is a true twisted mind at work here.