Cast: Anushka Sharma, Neil Bhoopalam, Darshan Kumaar, Deepti Naval
Director: Navdeep Singh
Rating: Three and a half stars
A man and a woman are cruising through their city at night. From their car they are looking out, at the shimmering glass buildings, hoardings, flyovers, Metro, and chatting. We don’t see them. We see what they see and hear what they are saying. Meera (Anushka Sharma) and Arjun (Neil Bhoopalam) are on their way to a dinner party. They are dressed for it but are dreading the predictable evening they have committed to. It promises to be as dull as all other previous dinners there. Yet they go.
Director Navdeep Singh’s NH10 takes some news reports, the reputation of a city and the state it is in — literally and geographically — and some inspiration from a long lineage of deathly-road trip flicks and delivers a horror-thriller that’s as bloody as it is brilliant, as terrifying as it is taut.
NH10 is exhausting. It’s emotionally sapping and finally cathartic and that’s because the film — its screenplay, direction and acting — makes us us invest emotionally in its lead pair.
That’s partly because Meera and Arjun are the perfect couple — young, good-looking, successful, self-assured, happily married. But more so because Singh and his writer, Sudip Sharma, have made NH10 about something that’s very important to us now — a woman’s place in India, on its streets, in its villages, restaurants, offices, and in their own cars. A holiday is planned and Meera and Arjun set out. Meera already knows that Gurgaon’s streets are hostile to her and her ilk. When they stop at a dhaba she sees that it also leaves hate messages for her and others like her in ladies’ public toilets. She blows smoke at it and then wipes it out.
At the dhaba, one world, “Bharat” according to RSS’ Mohan Bhagwat, is acting out its malevolence in full public view. And the city boy, the man from “India”, who has not known how to react to macho patriarchy when it’s in full force, decides to intervene.
Women instinctively know what that is — epic stupidity. Men not so much. They’ve not been taught how to cower, retreat, disappear. A successful, educated man who wears a Rs 2 lakh wristwatch, has a friend who is a DIG, feels entitled. Such men are gifted space in our world, they are masters of the universe. And when in the company of lesser men, they sometimes think they can fix things in the other world.
But that world, living on its own set of khap values, puts Arjun in his place immediately. He is told to keep out, to shut up, go away. As Arjun goes after them, as India decides to tick-off Bharat, we sit clicking that pen with Meera, fearing the inevitable. Bit by bit NH10 shatters the village idyll, the dehat which is often shown as innocent, by bringing to life another cow-belt stereotype so chillingly that when you get out of the hall, certain faces and SUVs will make you feel threatened.
