Review: Raman Raghav 2.0 is a rip-off with some dark, psychedelic thrills thrown in

It’s a loveless, bleak, schizoid, dystopic kosmos that Anurag Kashyap paints in Raman Raghav 2.0.

And then, it seems to be the fashion to have a cokehead (remember Shahid Kapoor in Udta Punjab)as a central character in so-called cutting-edge, contemporary Indian cinema.

Mash it up with other psychotic, abusive maniacs, strobe lights, dancing club scenes, quick cuts, Goa trance, gore, corrupt cops and Mumbai slums and one can understand why a film-maker like Anurag Kashyap thinks he has a winner with his experiment in film noir.

But, to little avail. The much touted thriller based on a serial killer of yore has been finding it tough to rake in the moolah at the box office following its release on June 24.

The story recalls the structure of Lars von Triers’ film Breaking the Waves and is broken into chapters titled The Prologue, The Locked Man, The Sister, The Hunter, The Hunted, The Son, The Fallen, The Soulmates. The chapters, I presume, want us to imagine the film as a novel unfolding on the screen.

Then there is the pretentious use of Rene Magritte’s phrase about the painting of a pipe — Ceci n’est pas une pipe — when the film-maker claims that this film is NOT about Raman Raghav or Psycho Raman, the serial killer who plagued Mumbai and is said to have killed 41 persons. No, it’s not. He died in jail. The criminals in this film get away scot free.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui does a stellar job in the role of the demented serial killer, Ramanna. Vicky Kaushal is the cokehead cop with violence seething beneath his expressionless, sour demeanour. His vulnerability comes to the fore in just one scene. Otherwise, he is a woman killer too, unashamed about bashing her head in after she’s dead to make it look like Ramanna’s work.

It’s a straight forward story that includes moments of suspense, adequate doses of chills, terror and death, a romance that is already doomed, that shaky hand-held camera feel in parts, hues of blues and blacks exploding suddenly into the light of day quickly marred by shots that take one into shadowy alleys and bylanes and the sweatshops and dark spaces in the Mumbai slums of which one gets panoramic birds-eye views occasionally.

The cokehead cop has a Telugu girlfriend. He has been traumatized by his father and the woman is, for him, only an object for willing or violent sex. He is ready to kill for drugs and to cover his tracks, and for Ramanna to take the rap. Ramanna is obsessed with this cop after witnessing him making a kill. And the moral of the story is that the two are/become soulmates.

Ramanna is pure, in a sense, and enjoys his killing spree. He holds his sister, her husband and her small child hostage and then despatches them across the Styx by bashing their heads in with his car jack.

Ramanna, of course, is the god of death Yama’s special emissary and enjoys his task as ‘executioner’. The cokehead cop has the envious task of finding this ‘dark twin’ supposedly to bring him to justice. By the end of the film, the two accept that they are birds of a feather, outside the pale of the law, genuine outsiders to society itself.

On Ramanna’s advice, the cop goes and kills his girlfriend who has stumbled upon their dark secret. There is a philosophical discourse, strewn with Hindu mythological references, that Ramanna gives the cop on the surety of the path they must both tread. The film ends with the dying screams of the cop’s girlfriend.

Kashyap is able to manufacture and sustain a creepy atmosphere throughout most of the film as his soul-less characters go about their roles like zombies. One moves in slow motion with them without either sympathy or empathy. Neither is one appalled or angered by their murders. It’s all routine and this is where the film fails, in my humble opinion.

There are those who think that Kashyap has done well in bringing out the characters of the killers. But if one has seen films like Psycho, Zodiac, Silence of the Lambs, Badlands, Seven or American Psycho, then this one is just about good enough and, perhaps, only because it is desi in contrivance and context.

No doubt, it’s enjoyable for a single watch. Thereafter, one is compelled to say: “Kashyap, you’ve got a long way to go, baby!”