Operating at an unnecessarily loud decibel level — both literally and figuratively — A Thursday’s well-intentioned premise gets drowned, and ultimately destroyed, beneath layers of a manipulative narrative that does more harm than good to its core issue. With its name as a dead giveaway, A Thursday, directed by Behzad Khambata, is built on the same lines as Neeraj Pandey’s compelling A Wednesday. A Thursday, however, has a commoner not only holding the administration accountable for being wronged in the past, but also seeking to browbeat the country’s top leader into promising simplistic solutions for a serious issue. As a result, A Thursday ends up being nothing more than a rabble-rousing watch that, despite a largely effective central turn from Yami Gautam Dhar, resorts to shameless emotional manipulation reinforced by every cliche in the book.
A largely vacuous addition to the complex genre of a social thriller brought on by a hostage crisis, the film opens with Naina Jaiswal (Yami), a sunshine-y playschool teacher who walks into class on, well, a Thursday morning, after a break of three weeks and takes 16 kids hostage. Her demand starts from par for the course ransom money to seeking an audience with the country’s Prime Minister. In between, the film is crammed with every predictable trope in the book, ranging from a police force that swings between apathetic and inefficient to a breaking news-hungry media willing to distort facts to push up viewership. This is Disney+Hotstar’s Dhamaka, with the drama dialled up several notches. Not in a good way.
Yami’s Naina goes about her job with cold-blooded precision, aided in no small measure by social media, through which she voices her demands, and the media that amplifies it. Director Khambata — whose previous film Blank is best summed up by its title — tries to pack in all he can, including the hint of a personal equation gone wrong between fellow cops Javed Khan (Atul Kulkarni) and Catherine Alvarez (Neha Dhupia), seen constantly screaming at each other, Dimple Kapadia, playing the PM, repeatedly mouthing, “Bhaad mein jaaye tumhara protocol” and cursory allusions to the Mumbai traffic and the Mumbai rain. Despite this, A Thursday amounts to being a decently built thriller in the first half but steadily unravels under the weight of its own ambition.
Naina’s actions, of course, as anyone familiar with his genre will know, are dictated by a painful past. A failed polity and a corrupt system robbed her of justice as a young girl, but A Thursday’s sensationalist tone and treatment ends up reinforcing the very stereotypes it seeks to challenge. Khambata’s tendency to tick off genre boxes results in stilted lines like, “Do we victims only deserve a f***ing candle march?” Another problem area is A Thursday’s flippant, and often insensitive, portrayal of mental health.
Which is a pity because Yami, despite a portrayal that is sometimes too self-aware, is successful in helping us ignore the film’s glaring problems. But ultimately, even she can’t lift a plot that promises much and delivers little. Here’s hoping ‘A Friday’ will be better. We are looking forward. Not.
A THURSDAY
Director: Behzad Khambata
Cast: Yami Gautam Dhar, Atul Kulkarni, Neha Dhupia, Dimple Kapadia, Karanvir Sharma, Maya Sarao
Running time: 129 minutes
