A survival thriller is supposed to keep you on the edge of your seat even if the poster for the said survival thriller kind of hints at its eventual outcome. Unfortunately, for the Disney+ Hotstar film Apurva starring Tara Sutaria, none of the above applies.
Set in the bleak landscapes of Madhya Pradesh, the 95-minute-long film follows the travails of Apurva (Tara Sutaria) after she is abducted by four men while she is on the way to Agra from Gwalior to surprise her fiance Siddharth (Dhairya Karwa). The four men — Jugnu (Rajpal Yadav), Sukkha (Abhishek Banerjee), Balli (Sumit Gulati) and Chhota (Aaditya Gupta) — are part of the Ranga gang that operates in the area and loot unsuspecting cars and trucks.
Director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat tries to up the stakes by establishing how brutal these men are even before we meet the lead character, Apurva. And it is here, right at the beginning, that the film falters. Not because the actors aren’t exceptional, they are, and they will fill you with loathing. But the violence, right from the start, tips over into the indulgent and unnecessary.
In the very first sequence in which the four gangsters loot a car, they shoot two men, playing with them like prey, and then steal the car and run the driver over, just for fun. Then these men speed past a bus and shoot its driver because he refused to let them over-take him. Fair enough because we know things like this happen in lawless lands. But to have one of the men pulverise the helper’s head for as long as it takes for the other three to loot the passengers of the bus is a bit much.
The kidnapping of Apurva is a spur-of-the-moment decision, brought on, of course, by her boyfriend being aggressive over the phone with Sukkha, the most alpha of the pack. Apurva actually feels incidental to the film, which seems to focus on and revel in the depravity of the four men, until the last act when she tries to escape their clutches. It is all about who gets to rape her first, when should they murder her and literal pissing contests. We get that these men are irredeemable; why magnify this aspect so much? Why make their excesses more important than the woman’s fight for survival?
Because of this, the film fails to make us connect with Apurva. We see her backstory through flashbacks in between all the rampant misogyny and unnecessary violence. In one such scene, Apurva is shown putting her driving instructor in his place, which is perhaps the film’s way of saying she is feisty, but it is a far stretch. There is also the romance with her fiance — it’s an arranged marriage — which also does nothing to make that connection with her.
Sutaria does an okay job of playing a woman in distress, believable in her initial helplessness and her fear. But the change from scared to steely resolve is not so believable. What flips the switch? Where does her reserve of strength come from? We don’t spend enough screen time with her to understand it. Not to forget the loopholes in the screenplay (how is it that when Apurva turns avenger, she only ever comes across each of her assailants one at a time?). One is bound to remember Anushka Sharma’s character in NH10, and both this film and its titular character feel like a poor copy.
Apurva is neither a good survival thriller nor a social commentary on what makes men like Sukkha, Jugnu, Balli and Chhota the way they are. It’s being touted as gritty and realistic, but the violence would have been justified had it been a slasher film.
