OTT: Aarya battles Russian mafia; an alien invasion & a classic love story

The success of Aarya, a web series on a widow (played by the stunning, svelte Sushmita Sen), who gets caught up with a drug mafia after her husband is murdered, took everyone by surprise. The fact that the protagonist was essayed by the beauty queen-turned-actress obviously had a role to play in the popularity of the web series, which landed on Disney+Hotstar on June 19, 2020.

But, the plot of the thriller, (based on a Dutch drama series Penoza by Pieter Bart Korthuis), was also full of twists and turns. Sen, who looked drop-dead gorgeous in some of the scenes, which included scenes of her doing her workouts (she is a fitness freak in real life), carried the series on her shoulders with aplomb. Maachis fame Chandrachur Singh, who had faded from public eye, played her husband, while Sikander Kher was Daulat, a hitman, helper and friend.

The story is about a wife and mother, who takes charge of her husband’s business after he’s shot dead and gets caught up with a drug cartel.  How she manages to fight off a mobster, a crazy coke-addict friend and business partner, Jawahar, an obsessive cop, ACP Khan (played by Vikas Kumar), the Russian mafia and ghosts from her own past, make up the series.

Season 2 of Aarya releases on December 10 and this time the Russian mafia is at her back. She needs to fork out ₹200 crore in five days to a Russian gangster. Her brother Sangram (Ankur Bhatia) is possibly gunning for her, while a new main character (Akash Khurana) wants to avenge his son’s death and vows that Aarya will pay with her life.

In the new season, director Ram Madhvani had said that Aarya again faces challenges every step of the way, as she is forced to walk a fine line between keeping her family alive and seeking revenge. Here, she turns into some sort of a don, well, if you binge-watched season 1, no reason why you won’t for the second season as well.

Another former reigning queen of Bollywood’s film too releases this weekend. Raveena Tandon is all set to make her debut in the streaming world as a tough cop called Kasturi Dogra in Netflix’s crime thriller Aranyak. This one is meant to be an eerie murder mystery set in a forest and the synopsis reads like this: “After a foreign teenage tourist disappears in a misty town, a harried, local cop Kasturi must join hands with her city-bred replacement Angad, on a big-ticket case that digs up skeletons and revives a forgotten myth of a bloodthirsty, serial killing entity in the fictitious forest town of Sironah.”

Besides Raveena Tandon, Parambrata Chatterjee, Ashutosh Rana, Meghna Malik, Zakir Hussain, and Indraneil Sengupta are also in the film.

Grown-up men playing cops and robbers: Sooryavanshi

Just like Rajnikanth’s film Annaatthe slid silently onto an OTT platform, similarly, Sooryavanshi too has made it to Netflix. What can you expect in the Bollywood action director Rohit Shetty’s cop universe? All the cops in his earlier films like Singham, Singham Returns, and Simmba were righteous men with anger issues. And, they could singularly beat up men. Made on a touted budget of ₹165 crore, the film captures the exploits of DCP Veer Sooryavanshi, the chief of the Anti-Terrorism Squad.

Sooryavanshi‘s plot centres on the police operation to find hidden RDX and neutralise sleeper cells. He is aided by Ranveer Singh and Ajay Devgn in this cop caper high on style, muscle-power and show and less on content like most of Shetty’s films. Remember Chennai Express and Dilwale?

Also read: OTT: Sexual crime in Pollachi, amnesiac Bob Biswas & cricket’s dark underbelly

Fighting an alien parasite

The science fiction Encounter lands on Amazon Prime Video. Riz Ahmed plays Malik Khan, an ex-Marine, who is part of a mission to eliminate an alien parasite (oh, that’s uncomfortable to watch) before it spreads across the planet. However, he whisks his children Jay and Bobby (Lucian-River Chauhan and Aditya Geddada) away from his ex-wife Piya (Janina Gavankar) on a road trip. He truly believes that his kids can survive this alien invasion if he is with them.

The story is really all about how a family—a troubled father and his two precocious sons—react in very different ways to the threat of a rapidly approaching apocalypse, said one review. Though Rotten Tomatoes has given the film an average rating of 56 per cent, Riz Ahmed has reportedly given another masterful performance. (he was brilliant in Sound of Metal).

Michael Pearce, the director explained in an official statement why he signed on the British actor. He had  wanted an actor who could be many things for the role of Marine. “He had to convincingly play a Marine, with all the grit, fortitude and intensity you would expect, but he also needed to portray the character’s weaknesses. And he had to be someone you felt an immediate empathy for on screen. The problem is, not many actors have all of those qualities,” he says.

Until, he saw Ahmed’s Academy Award-nominated performance in Sound of Metal. He said, “…when you watch him on screen, you just want to reach out and embrace the guy. It doesn’t matter how many mistakes his characters make, Riz just has some kind of unique empathetic energy.” It may be worth a watch just to see Ahmed do his magic again.

Must Watch – Hongkong director Wong Kar Wai’s masterpiece, In the Mood for Love lands on MUBI on December 12. It is highly recommended for movie lovers who will get a  rare chance to watch this film, which had received a lot of acclaim worldwide after its debut at the 2000 Cannes Film festival. It is often listed as one of the greatest films of all time and one of the major works of Asian cinema.

Set in Hong Kong of 1962, it is the love story of Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow, a journalist, who move into neighbouring apartments on the same day. Their encounters are formal and polite— until a discovery about their respective spouses creates an intimate bond between them. A deep love springs up between them but is never expressed.

This is a newly restored version of Wong’s beautifully crafted film. Critics have hailed it as a life-altering experience, and one review says that through “quiet, magisterial portrayals of emotion Wong achieves a towering understanding of the persistence of human longing”. It’s a film about, yes, love; but also betrayal, loss, missed opportunities, memory, the brutality of time’s passage, loneliness – the list can go on.