Freddy(Disney+Hotstar)
Starring Kartik Aaryan,Alaya F
Directed by Shashanka Ghosh
Spinechilling and a sleep-stealer, Freddy is to Kartik Aaryan’s career what The Joker was to Joaquin Phoenix. Both the actors bring out the darkest side of their personality to play characters who are tortured by their loneliness into doing things that perhaps normal human beings don’t.
Eerily credible, Freddy is a new universe of pain and vendetta for Kartik to explore. Providentially the plot charts a riveting destiny for the actor, giving him the opportunity to deep-dive into his psyche to explore emotions that he has never touched before. This is not only Kartik Aaryan’s most challenging part, it is also vivid proof of how deep he is willing to go into his subconscious for a complex role.
Layer after layer, Freddy peels off social niceties that define civil behaviour. Both Kartik and Alaya F are willing and able to reveal the beast within. There are constant twists in the plot with the two playing against one another like a tortured Tom and an abused Jerry.
Kartik is not afraid to let his twisted character have his say. There are some ravishing images of loneliness never seen before. My favourite montage of melancholy and solitude is when the desolate dentist dances for his pet turtle Hardy. It is a dance of locked-down freedom, neither liberating nor happy. Kartik dances like caged bird flapping its wings against its cage in the hope that some day it will be able to flee from its aloneness.
The dance is definitely going to make it as part of Kartik’s retro-showreel one day. For now, Freddy is just the fillip his growing stardom needed to show how far he has come in no time at all.
Parvez Sheikh’s writing tries to stay a step ahead of the audience and succeeds to a great extent. Suspense thrillers do not have a very impressive history in Bollywood. Freddy shines bright in its depiction of despair and darkness. Director Shahanka Ghosh extracts the optimum dread from the plot.
Kartik Aaryan’s dentist’s act has a whole lot of sharp teeth. And that’s the whole tooth.
