Karl Marx famously described religion as the opium of the people. In Haiwaan, Priyadarshan’s 2016 Malayalam film Oppam is turned into something quite intoxicating, if unsteady, by the original director. Priyadarshan knows how to dig into the crevices of the source material and extract the elixir of the theme without tampering with the tension.
So here’s what works: the cat-and-mouse game between Akshay Kumar, playing a ruthless killer, and a good-natured, sightless bloke who is broke financially and burdened with familial responsibilities but laden with things that matter.
Saif Ali Khan is splendidly graceful as a blind man who can see better than the entire cast, including a sociopathic killer blinded (!) by a fury that makes him impervious to reason. Someone wrote he doesn’t “look” blind.
The face-to-face between the two adversaries is clever, smart, and sensual. Both Saif and Akshay combat the demons within and between each other, with an abundance of brio.
But the film falls short—and here’s what that doesn’t work—of breath in trying to be breathlessly suspenseful while dealing with a truckload of annoying characters played by actors who seem to have strolled into the plot during their free time, none more so than Asrani, who is plainly out of sorts as a building watchman with memory lapses. God bless his soul.
Asrani is not the only superfluous character. There are loads of them, all of Priyadarshan’s patent background fillers, including, of course, Rajpal Yadav and Mohan Joshi. They collectively unravel a potentially taut thriller with their oafishly conceived presence in a plot which needed only two characters but is laden with so many that I wondered if Priyadarshan had forgotten to shut the studio doors during shooting.
Among the female characters, Saiyami Kher and little Pahal Chaudhary hold their ground in spite of the slippery screenplay.
That said, Haiwaan has much to recommend itself: Divakar Mani’s semi-sepia lensing lends a luscious luminosity to the proceedings. The songs, though an intrusion (Wait Until Dark rendered into Wait Until The Song Ends), are pleasantly filmed.
Not one of Priyadarshan’s best but certainly not among his worst.
