Haseen Dillruba Review: Taapsee Pannu’s ‘Haseen Dillruba’ is packed with crime and passion. The movie is set in the backdrop of a creeky small-town crime-of-passion. The first few minutes of Haseen Dillruba are so hectic that you would certainly want to take a quick break. A guy dies, there’s a wedding, Kanika Dhillon gets an unconventionally flattering credit
The movie revolves around a timid, ‘seedha saadha’ worker joe Rishabh aka Rishu Saxena (Vikrant Massey). Topping this character is a good-looking, brassy, outspoken gal Rani Kashyap (Taapsee Pannu). Now, the story goes like this – as the meet, greet and try to mate, along comes a muscle-flexing brawny fellow Neel Tripathi (Harshvardhan Rane). The movie is full of freeky stuff.
Haseen Dillruba Review, Taapsee Pannu Movie does lot of things but fails to cheer
The first 10 minutes of Haseen Dillruba are so hectic that a part of me almost wanted some sort of an interval. A guy dies, there’s a wedding, Kanika Dhillon gets an unconventionally flattering credit. And it does’t get any better from there. Netflix India acquires bad films on an almost monthly basis, but this — a cartoonish cautionary tale about the perils of arranged marriage — is among the most disappointing. And I’ve seen (scratch that, survived) The Girl on the Train and Sardar Ka Grandson.
Meet the #DineshPandit of #HaseenDilruba pic.twitter.com/0Vwb0k8t9b
— taapsee pannu (@taapsee) July 1, 2021
The set up looks just okay, even though the patently fictional name for a real town sticks in the craw. ‘Jwalapur’, which our Rani is so sniffy about, looks like any of your North Indian small towns which has a mighty river flowing by. But given the thin skins we seem to have developed in terms of giving or taking offence, the names of places seem to have been the first to be dumped. A pity, because real names have weight, and the power to turn things around.
The friction between the newly-weds, the awkwardness when it comes to getting it on, the sarcastic comments about men being ‘phooski’ in bed, all comes rolling out, and the situation is ripe for transgression. There’s a massive blast, a badly-mutilated body, and a suspect on whom the local inspector (Aditya Srivastava) has drawn a bead. Will the culprit be found? Will the survivors live happily ever after?
Kanika Dhillon’s story (the writer gets top billing in the opening credits, a good move) to give us a story full of sex, lies and smutty video. But what’s missing is the lack of sense, which is important for a film like this to work: each roiling emotion is spelt out, and what you get is a flat moment. We wish the ‘Hasee Toh Phasee’ creator had something more peppy and enjoyable coming our way.
Taapsee Pannu’s performance as a bored housewife named Rani is all over the place. In one moment she’s the standard Taapsee Pannu-type — brash but somewhat endearing — and in the next, she goes stunningly off-brand, and literally begs a man to accept her. It’s a jarring shift, considering how Rani had been presented to us. The issue here isn’t the change of heart — these things happen — but the film’s indifference towards its own internal logic.
There isn’t a single minute of straightforward storytelling in Haseen Dillruba — it’s an assault on all senses, including that of the common kind. The film clocks in at a little over two hours — conventional, you might say — but don’t let that fool you. It feels like four.