Accused - Konkana, Prathibha - Netflix & Dharma productions - Page 2

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‘Accused’ Movie Review: Guilty Of Not Reading The Room

Accused dives straight in. It has no time to mess around. We are parachuted into the life of Dr. Geetika Sen (Konkona Sen Sharma), a senior surgeon at a London hospital: smart, confident, married, on the brink of a major promotion and a move to Chester. She’s a taskmaster, but so good at her job that her social identity — a queer South Asian immigrant — is a footnote. Until it isn’t. HR receives an anonymous email by a patient accusing Geetika of predatory behavior and sexual harassment. Just like that, this life starts to unravel. Seeds of uncertainty are planted in the head of her wife, Meera (Pratibha Ranta), a doctor at a children’s hospital herself. Social media puts her on trial. Her colleagues look at her differently. An investigation begins. The film points in both directions, of course. Geetika’s personality is scrutinized in a way that invites the average viewer to interpret complexity as culpability. It says something that, even as an alleged perpetrator, she gets the victim beatdown: her past is dug up, mistakes are weaponised, judgment errors are revealed, evidence of moral ambiguity is shown, credibility is doubted. In short, she is viewed as guilty until proven innocent.

I see the one-line hook of Accused: what if it’s a female who abuses power? But it’s such a strange film — a misguided gimmick to subvert a genre that is fundamentally skewed to begin with. For starters, it seems not to know how reckless it is to stage a post-MeToo story in which, regardless of gender, the accusers are murkier than the accused. To mention a movement that empowered survivors to come forward in context of a narrative that’s designed to discredit these voices is tone-deaf at best. Aspersions are cast on several players: the wife’s nice-guy friend, a white colleague, a rival for the dean’s post, a younger ex-flame, an ex-partner, a disgruntled former employee. It’s like watching a whodunit where everyone is a ‘suspect’ in a case of character assassination rather than a character’s assassination. It revels in the tension of who accused her; by the time the film reckons with the why and what, it's a bit too late. Each of them has a reason to dislike her. She is, after all, an unpleasant girl-boss that a patriarchal (and racially charged) society is wired to mistrust.

There’s also the irony of the characterisation. Geetika’s grey reputation stems from the fact that she inadvertently ends up resembling the very men she has had to battle along the way. In her quest to make it in a male-dominated field, she has subconsciously built herself up to be like one: hostile towards ‘weak’ women, unaccountable, curt, intolerant, arrogant. It’s a perceptive observation, one we see across media and corporate landscapes, but the film itself treats her like a male protagonist. All her flaws are vindicated at every turn; she is seldom wrong, even when she is; not once does her younger partner question her; her ambition is seen as a madness. She is a woman of contradictions, yet the script somehow flattens her into a gender-reversal placeholder. To its credit, it gives her the intuition to recognise her own complicity in the system. But the Netflixification of the premise means that it’s done in a simplistic, preachy manner. Every ounce of subtext is spelt out in a way that reduces Geetika to a concept. Even the title first alludes to “abuse” before it corrects itself to “accused”. I get that the idea is to incriminate everyone — including the average viewer — for deeply entrenched biases, but the writing doesn’t need smoke-and-dagger twists and unimaginative exchanges to make its point.

The treatment is at odds with the multilayered theme. The humanity in the story isn’t allowed to breathe by the algorithm. In most scenes, you can tell the difference between what the film is and what it wants to be. The urgent background score keeps trying to sell mystery and rhythm in a social thriller. The film opens with a shadowy shot of a hoodie-wearing person typing an anonymous email in a library. The sanitised age-gap and same-sex marriage at the centre goes through a crisis of trust, but it often feels like an excuse to introduce an eccentric character or two. There’s a stylish slow-mo walk after a crucial revelation; there’s a musical sad-montage (only instrumental, thankfully) to convey isolation and conflict. There’s a chase at night that almost threatens to become a clunky screwball adventure. Geetika’s arc unfolds like it’s part of a franchise that will put her in different temperatures of hot water every sequel. At points, it isn’t clear if this is a relationship drama with a side of sexual harassment allegations or a workplace drama with a side of marital conflict. And then there are the bizarre dubbing and dialogue-delivery issues. All the British and foreign characters sound like they’ve been voiced by Indians with wonky accents; the Indians speak in a classroom-coded way tailored to modern OTT viewers who can ‘hear’ the plot if the visuals drive them away. It’s a deal-breaker for a subject so loaded. Actually, it’s a deal-breaker for any sort of movie.

Somewhere in Accused, there’s an interesting film that’s reluctant to come forward and be heard. And this has nothing to do with the gloomy English weather — which is more of Hindi cinema’s reverse-exoticisation aesthetic than a genuine atmosphere that supplies the psychology of such plots. It’s a disappointing watch, not least because it takes some doing to fumble an unorthodox story starring an emotionally intelligent actor like Konkona Sen Sharma. But she’s shaky within the constraints of a tell-don’t-show formula. Accused seems content (pun intended) to only introduce a thorny topic; it seems satisfied enough with a daring synopsis. The curiosity to cut beyond is constantly undone by the obligation to be watchable, accessible and performative. There are worthy talking points: like how infidelity and abuse is measured against the same yardstick, how women in charge are held to a different moral standard than their normalised male counterparts, how the law isn’t equipped to deal with the authenticity of allegations, how age-gap companionship is shaped by a lopsided power dynamic, or even how ‘freedom’ in a first-world democracy is not without hidden terms and regulations. But the talking points remain bullet-points. It’s not an easy task: to streamline all these dimensions and hit that sweet spot between (cultural) sensitivity and (artistic) sensibility. A film more alive to social media discourse and true-crime virality is just not it. Scrolling through trauma is self-defeating in an age where unverified accusations trump inherited truths.