Candy and The Pizza Girl: A wildly ambitious debut that is as messy as it is fascinating

Candy and the Pizza Girl

Rating - *** (3/5)

There are films that ease you in gently, hold your hand through the narrative and make sure you are comfortable at every turn. Candy and The Pizza Girl is aggressively, unapologetically not one of those films. Akkhil Kapur's debut feature throws you headfirst into a bizarre, neon-soaked universe from its very first frame and simply expects you to keep pace. It is chaotic, it is strange, it is occasionally exhausting and it is also, in the same breath, genuinely unlike most things you will encounter in the Indian indie space right now. That is both its greatest strength and, depending on your patience levels, its most significant limitation.

The film operates like a controlled explosion that is occasionally neither controlled nor particularly explosive. Ideas collide into each other, characters materialise and dissolve, tonal shifts happen without any warning or apology and the whole thing hurtles forward with the energy of someone who has a great deal to say and is slightly unsure of the order in which to say it. For a first film, that is not entirely a bad problem to have. The ambition is unmistakable. The execution, however, is uneven enough to keep this comfortably in the territory of a promising but imperfect debut.

A Cast That Carries The Chaos Remarkably Well

Whatever reservations one might have about the film's structural messiness, the performances are where Candy and The Pizza Girl earns its most convincing ground. Ninad Kamat is a genuine revelation here. For an actor who has spent years operating in familiar registers, watching him throw himself into something this brash, comical and unapologetically new-age is both surprising and thoroughly entertaining. There is an unpredictability to his work in this film that keeps you perpetually off-balance in exactly the right way. It reads, quite honestly, like a performer rediscovering what he is capable of when the material demands something entirely different from him.

Shivani Singh brings a natural, unforced charm to Candy that makes the character immediately likeable without any obvious effort. She fits the role with an ease that suggests considerably more to come as she accumulates experience. Priya Banerjee holds her corner of the film's mysteriously offbeat atmosphere with reasonable conviction, while Dara Sandhu brings a quiet, grounded authority to his scenes that makes him simply very easy to watch. Nimish Shitole delivers something genuinely interesting, a performance so darkly sincere that you are never entirely sure what your relationship with his character is supposed to be, which is precisely the point.

The Moments That Make It Worthwhile

The film is generously stocked with sequences that feel designed to lodge themselves in your memory whether you approve of them or not. A trippy car sequence that defies easy description, a crossdressing conman channelling Marilyn Monroe with remarkable commitment, a man whose entire emotional architecture is built around revenge over a single slap, and a peddler inexplicably dressed in a doctor's coat. It is weird in the way that only fully intentional weirdness can be and that counts for something.

The single most memorable sequence in the entire film involves what begins as a flirtatious spaghetti conversation that detonates spectacularly into a Punjabi aunty meltdown of magnificent proportions the instant she discovers her companion has no social media presence. The tonal whiplash is so absurd and so perfectly executed that it demands an immediate rewatch. The performer responsible is Poonam Kapur, Vinod Khanna's sister, and the family resemblance combined with the sheer audacity of the performance makes the whole thing even more delightfully unexpected. She owns that scene entirely and it is easily the film's boldest and most rewatchable moment.

Bold Intent Does Not Always Equal Full Delivery

The honest conversation about Candy and The Pizza Girl is that its pacing stumbles in places where tighter editing could have sharpened its impact considerably. The trippiness, so effective in smaller doses, occasionally overstays its welcome and the film's indulgences accumulate in the second half in ways that test your goodwill. At three stars it sits exactly where it should, a film you admire more than you unconditionally love, a debut that signals a genuinely interesting filmmaker who is not yet entirely in command of his most interesting instincts. Worth watching, worth discussing and worth keeping an eye on what comes next.