Sometimes you watch a movie and then want to kill the whole team behind the movie and yourself too. Something of the sort happened to me recently.

I know I could have NOT watched it in the first place. After-all you wouldn’t really know how bad it is until you have watched it for a bit, right? And once you are in, it is as if you are hypnotised. The sheer horror of what’s unfolding, and by that I don’t mean it was a horror movie but rather the utter stupidity, holds you as if in a spell, forcing you to watch it to the end.

This does not happen to me a lot because I pick and choose what I watch. There is only a finite number of hours in a day and I have so many things I want to do. Read, write, play the keyboard, cook, watch good stuff on television, go for a walk, and so on. So why waste time on movies that are stupid and make no sense? And yet there you have it, I wasted precious hours watching this one.

All through the movie I was fascinated by the fact that Netflix actually paid money to air it. And before that came the guy willing to finance the making of this movie (who probably had too much cash and didn’t know what to do with it!), the actors who agreed to ‘act’ (in roles they themselves were not convinced about), the writer who wrote the story (who seemed to have absolutely no clue about court proceedings or police procedures or…. oh leave it, the list is too long!), and the one who edited it (while sleepwalking perhaps?).

I am baffled thinking how they all sat together and discussed the movie. Didn’t they want to laugh out loud hearing their own selves spouting nonsense? And what about when the movie was being filmed? Didn’t the cameramen and other crew members want to burst out laughing hearing the dialogues? What a poor opinion moviemakers must have of their audience if they thought this would sell!

But

Why blame them? People ARE watching it. There were those who said ‘I liked the movie’ and what makes me cringe, THEY WERE WOMEN! I even read a raving review of the movie in a flowery language from a ‘modern’ young woman saying it addressed domestic violence. In which world that was and how it was done, she alone knows. I bet you anything the makers of the movie have no clue. Reading that review, I couldn’t help but weep for the future… of women, modern or otherwise.

©️ Shail Mohan 2024