Halahal cuts to the chase immediately. A girl is on the heels of a boy on a dark highway in Ghaziabad (given the setting, one would think it would be the other way round) asking him repeatedly to hand over a pen drive. The petrified boy makes a dash for it across the road but the girl comes under the tyres of a speeding truck. The boy sprints away but a group of men, till then waiting in the shadows, drag the girl to the side of the highway and set her alight. In a few minutes, she’s reduced to a handful of charred bones.
Literally and figuratively, things are not pretty in Halahal. The opening frames may dispense with the rare act of extreme violence in the film but the ugliness of human behaviour is palpable throughout its 97-minute running time. Nothing is really black or white in the world of Halahal — that aptly translates to ‘poison’ — with the grey showing up in everyone. This is a layered and powerful thriller for the most part, that is both self aware and satirical.
With the crime established within the first few minutes, Halahal primarily works as a feverish investigative thriller, even as it benefits from a strong emotional core. The victim is Archana, a medical student, whose father Shiv Sharma (Sachin Khedekar) refuses to accept her death being labelled as a suicide by the local cops. One look at Archana’s remains is enough to convince Shiv, a doctor, that there is foul play involved. Facing an apathetic system, the helpless father enlists the services of a corrupt cop Yusuf (Barun Sobti), who doubles as a hustler for hire, to get to the bottom of what appears to be a murky mess. As the two chip away, first alone and then together, they realise that not only is there much more to the mystery than meets the eye, the revelations also have the power to change their own moral standing.
Set predictably in the corrupt corridors of northern India where money and power are, in a way, mutually inclusive, Halahal is loosely based on the 2013 Vyapam scam that blew the lid off a medical entrance exam and admission racket. Director Randeep Jha and writer Zeishan Quadri take the germ of that scandal and build a personal and poignant story that sees a grieving father pull out all the stops to bring his daughter’s killers to justice. It’s in these intimate moments — Khedekar brings alive both the anxiety and angst of a hapless parent — that Halahal is at its most watchable. What also works is the distinct change in the equation between Shiv and Yusuf, the two sharing their tales of woe over shared glasses of whisky on a pavement, with Yusuf, effectively played by Sobti despite the awkward moustache, finally finding some purpose to mend his fundamentally broken core and grow a conscience.
Halahal, however, isn’t your average fast-paced thriller. Matters unfold at a leisurely pace, even when it has just an hour-and-a-half at its disposal, and while most of it works as a slow-burn watch, parts of it do tend to feel a little heavy handed. Humour, despite the sombre material, is used very effectively here, especially in Sobti’s portrayal of Yusuf, and it’s the performances of the two leading men — who play off each other — that iron out the creases.
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