Andhadhun : Box office and Review thread

Andhadhun is a stunning, comic, grisly, absurd, intense, cold, crazy and must-watch, applauds Sukanya Verma.

Under that silver, wiry mop of hair dwells the brain of a reckless genius.

Director Sriram Raghavan's fertile mind is a breeding ground for awe-inducing mischief.

The degree of devilry it plots in Andhadhun, a thriller so scrumptiously bereft of morality, it's to be seen to believe.

And see it you must before watching trailers, reading reviews or bumping into that friend who beat you to it.

The clever wordplay in Andhadhun's title reflects a duality that colours nearly everything in the film.

What they say and what we see, there's plenty to read in between, from crabmeat cooking techniques to childhood injuries.

Csar award-winning French short film, L'Accordeur is at the heart of Andhadhun's twisted schemes and its standalone, centrepiece sequence.

Flawless editing (Pooja Ladha Surti), masterful camerawork (K U Mohanan), macabre mood and Amit Trivedi's rousing, rhythmic piano play place it up there in the pantheon of edge-of-the-seat classics.

If music is both an instrument of composure and violence, Raghavan turns jump scares into something of an art form in this spectacularly staged masterstroke.

Both old Pune and burgeoning townships form an unsuspecting backdrop to Andhadhun's sinister events after a blind pianist (Ayushmann Khurrana) lands at a faded movie star's (Anil Dhawan) door to deliver a live recital.

Tabu, as the actor's trophy wife (think I saw her reading Sujatha Rangarajan's book about the same, Anita) is the intended recipient of this musical surprise.

There are others too -- the girl on the yellow scooter (Radhika Apte), the cop who eats 16 eggs a day (Manav Vij), his hyper, Chinese bhel-serving better half (Ashwini Kalsekar), a genial lottery ticket seller (Chaya Kadam), a sneaky, prankster kid (Kabir Sajid) and a doctor caught up in life and liver (Zakir Hussain).

This isn't some suspenseful setup for corpses and clues.

Traps are laid without keeping us out of the loop.

Alibi ready folk see through each other defences.

People die and it's no secret.

It's the defiance to withhold that really alarms and engrosses.

Lest you imagine you've got it all figured, it's not the mystery of murder, but the murky, inscrutable human mind that truly interests the makers of Badlapur and Johnny Gaddar.

There's a neat line in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt -- 'I have the feeling that inside you somewhere, there's something nobody knows about.'

A self-proclaimed admirer of the film-maker, Raghavan seems to have designed his entire script on those lines in company of writers Pooja Ladha Surti, Arijit Biswas and Hemant Rao.

He toys with our judgement, shames our sleuthing instincts, challenges us to second guess and laughs when we miserably fail.

Intellectual humiliation was never this enjoyable.

Yesteryear actor Anil Dhawan's presence adds a winsome, whimsical touch.

There is no false note to his flamboyance or harmless has-been ways as he revels in his forgotten legacy going over old videos and songs in a sprawling apartment whose cerulean, floral walls are plastered with poster-sized reminders.

Andhadhun shares its retro knowledge of his once successful career in handpicked songs, their smartly packaged instrumental version whilst paying ode to Doordarshan's beloved Chitrahaar and Chayageet.

Raghavan's love for pop culture references incorporates everything from Sholay to Shakespeare. And as the lady well versed in both Lady Macbeth (Maqbool) and Gertrude (Haider), Tabu's delicious insights into the disconcertingly unruffled keeps you invested and at arm's length all at once.

As the cat AND mouse of this constantly shifting game undecided between boy who cried wolf and closet Gandhian, Ayushmann Khurrana delivers the most nimble performance of his career.

Andhadhun tests his 'acting' skills like never before and he rises to the challenge like a pro.

Andhadhun is completely aware of its intelligence and quick wits mercilessly testing our gullibility while Raghavan leads us to its staggering finish with the finesse of a Mikado champion.

It's stunning, comic, grisly, absurd, intense, cold, crazy and must-watch.

AndhaDhun movie review: Tabu may be the star of this thriller but Ayushmann Khurrana packs a solid performance

AndhaDhun movie review:The Tabu, Ayushmann Khurrana and Radhika Apte thriller has been directed by Sriram Raghavan. The movie also stars Zakir Hussain, Ashwini Kalsekar and Anil Dhawan in prominent roles.

Andhadun, starring Ayushmann Khurrana, Radhika Apte and Tabu, is a riveting and twisted classic thriller, says our movie review.

By Anna MM Vetticad

In 2016, Priyadarshan made a Malayalam film about a blind man (played by Mohanlal) who becomes an unwitting 'eyewitness' to a murder. The hero's visual disability in Oppam was accompanied by a heightened sense of hearing and smell that made him a potential threat to the killer.

Now what happens if a killer's self-preservation instinct causes them to not care that the 'witness' is sightless? That question was the starting point of an intriguing French 13-minuter titled L'accordeur (The Piano Tuner) from 2010, directed by Oliver Treiner.

Writer-director Sriram Raghavan draws on an atom of just a single element from the French short (which is acknowledged here in the credits), turning it into a full-length Hindi feature that should rank among the most fascinating, fun, funny suspense thrillers ever to emerge from Bollywood. If you are determined to find out what that one element is, you could watch L'accordeur on the internet. You could, but why would you? Because even discovering that secret in the opening half hour of Raghavan's Andhadhun (The Blind Melody) is a pleasurable experience.

Here is what little can be revealed of the plot. Ayushmann Khurrana plays Andhadhun's Akash, a pianist in Pune who is introduced to us as a blind musician trying desperately to complete a tune. Akash is frustrated with the stereotypical expectation that a disability sharpens the creative mind, since he just cannot find the inspiration to wrap up that damned melody. His new friend Sophie (Radhika Apte) is unmoved by his struggle: incompleteness, she tells him, is what gives certain things their finish.

In the posher quarters of the metropolis live the glamorous Simi (Tabu) and her wealthy, much older husband, the forgotten Hindi film star Pramod Sinha (Anil Dhawan). Pramod a.k.a. Pammi is stuck in a time warp in which he keeps rewatching his hits, causing considerable irritation to Simi. Her ambition is a career in films and she wants Pammi to use his network to help her.

From these unconnected strands is born a black comedy that is breathless in its pace and breathtaking in the scope of its imagination, linking seemingly random occurrences in the cosmos, and with all its entertainment value, arriving at an unexpectedly thoughtful study of both kismet and human nature. People tend to let their guard down with those who cannot see or hear and with children, fear also often causes us to appear guilty of more than what we have done, and the writers play around gleefully with these truths.

The premise is completely wacko, a what-if to beat all what-ifs. It is also familiar terrain for Raghavan whose films Ek Hasina Thi, Johnny Gaddaar and Badlapur are a testament to his fixation on evil crackpots and cold-hearted criminality. The story by Hemanth Rao and Raghavan himself has been expanded into a multi-layered screenplay by the latter with Arijit Biswas, Pooja Ladha Surti (also the film's editor) and Yogesh Chandekar. At one level, the result of their collaboration is a hugely enjoyable, fast-paced thriller, but at another it is a quietly observant tale reminding us that however convinced we may be that we have outsmarted fate, the universe is always the boss of our lives.

It takes a bunch of nutty, unfettered actors to put their faith in this nutty, impertinent script. As it happens, the cast and writing of Andhadhun are made for each other.

Very often, a character's disability becomes a crutch that actors lean on, letting that aspect of the part overshadow their entire performance. Khurrana is not that kind of artiste. While he does not stumble even once in playing blind, he is just as effective in conveying Akash's amorality, affections, aspirations and fears.

In a smaller role, Apte exemplifies guilelessness and innocence that are a refreshing contrast to the machinations all around her. The supporting cast is impeccable, never once faltering when the storyline takes them to places that lesser actors could have reduced to a farce. Kabir Sajid the darling little boy from Secret Superstar beautifully, albeit briefly, plays a child in Andhadhun who epitomises the moral ambivalence of most characters in the story.

The queen of all she surveys in this film though is the tremendously gifted Tabu, whose chameleonesque talent is put to great use here as she plays a woman with many faces, a creature with a steely grit, capable of vileness, yet in possession of very human vulnerabilities, still yet capable of discussing the foulest of her actions with such casualness that it is impossible not to laugh. The manner in which Simi/Tabu switches from one emotion to the next to the next, at one point her face and voice conveying completely different feelings, is a sight to behold.

Terrible things happen in this film, yet it manages to tread lightly throughout. This overall effect and the build-up of suspense are a consequence of the smooth interplay between Raghavan's purposefulness, KU Mohanan's clever camerawork (what he hides being as important as what he chooses to show), and the intricate sound design by Madhu Apsara. The weave is tied in by Amit Trivedi's well-conceptualised soundtrack, the thoughtful mix of original songs and re-runs of classics, and Daniel B George's background score.

Few musical instruments can match the piano in its ability to build up an atmosphere of intrigue. Soulful, robust and sharp, it is a constant companion to the twists and turns in this madcap movie.

The music, like the film in its entirety, is a tribute to 1970s Hindi cinema, the point driven home all the more sharply by the decision to cast Anil Dhawan as Pammi. Dhawan shone fleetingly on the big screen in real life in that very decade. Snatches of scenes from his actual films are played in Andhadhun, lending an air of poignance to his character's journey and nostalgia to the film as a whole.

If you plan to watch Andhadhun, make sure you arrive early so that you do not miss the prologue or the old-fashioned credits, along with the bizarre statement accompanying them on screen, plus the tribute to Vividh Bharti's Chhaya Geet and Doordarshan's Chitrahaar. It all counts, as does every minute, second and millisecond of the unpredictable, crazy ride that follows.

Andhadhun and Loveyatri opened to a poor 10% response with Loveyatri being a little ahead as Mumbai / Gujarat is a little better but its about the evening as that will tell which film comes out ahead. The morning collections are very low so do not mean anything. Even if one film improves 10-15% compared to the other it will go ahead in the evening.

Andhadhun actually looks a Mumbai film so eventually will be beating Loveyatri in that circuit as Andhadhun looks a film made for Mumbai city and Pune.

Both films have easily been overshadowed by the Hollywood release Venom which has taken a good opening of around 25-30%. This film will collect more than the combined total of Andhadhun and Loveyatri unless they show huge turnaround. Venom has affected all the Hindi film being sceened including Sui Dhaaga and it is on course for a solid weekend.

The opening comparison of the opening show collections of Andhadhun and Loveyatri are below. All the figures are like for like.

Mumbai (40 Cinemas)

Loveyatri - 976 admits

Andhadhun - 825 admits

Delhi (25 cinemas)

Loveyatri - 564 admits

Andhadhun - 651 admints

Chandigarh (8 Cinemas)

Loveyatri - 109 admits

Andhadhun - 156 admits

Jaipur (10 cinemas)

Loveyatri - 162 admits

Andhadhun- 127 admits

TOTAL (83 cinemas)

Loveyatri - 1790 admits

Andhadhun - 1693 admits