Remember that edge-of-the-seat feeling in the movie theatre? Lips parched, popcorn forgotten? It is back, and what a whammy actor-producer Soham Shah has delivered in the crazily titled Crazxy! You may or may not agree with the way the thriller finally pans out (messages tend to dilute the tension). But by jove, this is one helluva ride, orchestrated and executed by the man behind Tumbbad.
Sohum Shah gets behind the wheel, literally, to manoeuvre the cyclonic drama through a series of cannily composed adventures. At the end of the terse travel—the narration is just over 90 minutes long—I was staring open-mouthed at the screen, wondering how the heck Sohum Shah pulled it off.
Credit, of course, must go to the writer-director Girish Kohli for pulling off a thriller that is original and utterly gripping… no more than that, ensnaring! The closest we come to the clasp-and-gasp tension of this film is Liam Neeson’s Taken.
Here it is, Dr Abhimanyu Sood’s specially abled little daughter who is taken by a psycho (Tinu Anand, voice only). Once the intriguing premise is set up, Sohum’s Sood goes through a torrent of explosive adventures in just 60 minutes: from negotiating Mumbai’s impossible traffic to meet the kidnapper’s deadline to changing a punctured tyre in the middle of nowhere to—hold your breath—instructing a junior in an intricate surgery on the phone.
By the way, the tyre change and the surgery happen simultaneously. At times, the screenplay may seem to be running ahead of itself, but you won’t be disconnected from the protagonist’s mounting tension for even a second.
Interestingly, there is only one character on screen, and that’s Sohum Shah’s sinfully beleaguered surgeon, Abhimanyu. Shah pulls it off with incredible mobility, transitioning from an uncaring absentee dad at the beginning to a guilt-stricken repentant parent at the end.
The narrative never lets us off the hook. We are with Dr Sood till the end. Voice performances recur with rigorous impact, stoking the tension without being physically visible on screen. Namisha Sajayan (as Abhimanyu’s hysterical wife), Shilpa Shukla (as his mistress) and Tinu Anand (as the kidnapper) give excellent voice performances, repudiating the belief that cinema is predominantly a visual medium.
It can be an effective aural medium, too, in the right hands. Crazxy uses voices, snatches of music and incidental sounds to vocalize and amplify the suspense. Kishore Kumar’s song ‘Abhimanyu chakravayuha mein phans gaya tu’ from the Amitabh Bachchan starrer Inquilab is used here to telling efficacy.
The Bachchan’s baritone makes recurrent appearances and his connect with Tinu Anand (in Shahenshah) pops up cheekily.
There is much to be admired and applauded in Crazxy, not the least of it being its propensity to break the rules of the thriller genre without tripping over its cleverness, not to mention the immaculate cinematography, editing, and sound design.
When was the last time you saw one actor holding fort throughout the film? Sunil Dutt in Yaadein? That was boring! This is anything but.
You know those racing-against-time thrillers that somehow never come out right in Hindi cinema? Well, that’s just changed. Crazxy (why such a frivolous title?) takes you for a ride that will be hard to forget.
