Afwaah review: Sudhir Mishra’s warning against fake news is unsubtle but urgent

In a scene from Sudhir Mishra’s Afwaah, a social media manager tells a young politician “If you want to have a future as a politician, you need to understand the internet.” It’s an unsubtle prophecy mixed into the DNA of a film that doesn’t believe in relaying its messages subversively. Instead, everything is said out loud, with the casualness and rhetorical might of a WhatsApp forward pretending to be a fact.

In the age of cyber warfare, changing histories and uncontrollable reach, fact and fiction regularly collide in the annals of political discourse, usually unprepared to hear the other side. To which effect, the straightforwardness of Mishra’s film also feels like its biggest weakness. It’s on the nose, smeared across the walls and screamed incisively from a distance without the patience to also bed in its stubborn soil, something akin to the softness of a human story.

Apparent intentions

Afwaah begins with young politician Vicky Bana, played by Sumeet Vyas, inciting a riot in a Muslim majority area, resulting in one of his handymen Chandan (Sharib Hashmi) murdering an innocent victim. With elections around the corner, the town of Sawalpur becomes a hotbed for religious tension. At the time of this incident, visiting his hometown is the US-returned adman, Adab, played with uncharacteristic inertness by Nawazuddin Siddiqui.

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Bana’s fiancée Nivi (Bhumi Pednekar) is woke to the extent that she runs away from home after Bana refuses to exhibit signs of guilt or restraint. Nivi runs into Adab, and the two elope, soon to be followed by the rumour that they are indeed inter-religious lovers. There is also the side-story of a corrupt cop, imposing himself on a female subordinate as a real-life pursuit also turns virtual with hashtags, social campaigns, bloodlust and social media hate-mongering.

Afwaah’s intentions are far too apparent and rushed to deem it a story attempting to become a message as opposed to the other way around. Far too many characters in the film seem unaware of the zeitgeist this film is set in. The young bullish politician, for example, doesn’t know how social media can be used to canonise bigotry.

The abruptness of Nivi’s rebellion casts suspicions about the company she has kept all these years. The US-returned adman, driving around in an imported car, feels like an awkward masquerade. Most of these performances, except maybe Hashmi’s, feel like they have been engineered with a gut instinct for the goodness of the message, the plainness of its stance, rather than the complexity of the world such narratives emerge from.

Enamoured by the nobility of a cause

Mishra’s film takes far too long to get going. A laboured first half eats time at the expense of nuance, steaming ahead like a potboiler. Its main artillery, the spectre of social media, it summons much later. It’s here that the film actually grows on you, its directness finally poking your gaze. Up until then, Afwaah diddles and dallies with character arcs so insipid and mundane they might as well have been faceless victims.

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Nivi is unconvincingly on the money about everything she believes in, that obnoxious little mix of greatness and grief. Vyas does okay but is unchallenged by the possibility of emotional ups and downs. He deals with his fiancée, like he deals with his henchmen — steely and unemotional. Siddiqui looks the oddest, an English-speaking NRI, who feels at home in the one moment, when he lets out a gaali in anger. Casting against type here evidently does not work.

There is an argument here to place Afwaah alongside the immodest attempts of many hate-inciting fabrications pretending to be films. Mishra’s film is so obvious in its design and intent, it doesn’t even have the time to extract from a great cast the performances they deserved to offer. It’s a clear sign of being enamoured by the nobility of a cause to the point that it makes the relevance of the craft of cinema insignificant.

Unfurling the monsters of rumour-mongering, bigotry

In principle, it has more in common with hairy WhatsApp posters that care only about the seedy messaging they channel as opposed to the cultural aesthetic they can erect. Whatever shape this form of deliverance takes is incidental. Only its death-like finality must be clear. The conversational tone, that all discourse ought to be built on, is evidently being bled out of our cinema. On each side of an argument, people want to say their piece, with an air of condescending conclusiveness and move on.

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Afwaah is, of course, significant. If for nothing else, then for its unostentatious pursuit of the truth it believes in. What it lacks in terms of nuance, it more than makes up for with a thrilling second half sprint to a rewarding climax that unfurls the monster that rumour-mongering and bigotry are. The only problem is that none of its characters, neither its oppressors nor its victims feel like lived-in humans with hope, guilt or flaws. Instead, they come across as monotones of moral positions, ecstatic about the role they are getting to play in a well-intentioned film.

The message is obviously welcome, but its forthrightness is also the undoing of a narrative that though it might spark a conversation, will not last the entirety of a fireside chat. It comes, screams its sermon, and leaves. Maybe you can admire the candour, but for an expensive multiplex ticket, you can and probably should expect more.