'Crazxy' Review: Sohum Shah Expertly Leads a Thrilling Race Against Time
'Crazxy' stars Sohum Shah and hit theatres on 28 February.
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One segment in Sohum Shah-starrer Crazxy does more to hold your attention than most thrillers over the past few years have – a man’s race against time is interrupted by a surgery and a flat tire. Everything about the sequence in near-perfect – the performance, the way the tension is built, the time design, the attention to detail.
The scene is kinetic and charged, especially owing to the way director Girish Kohli doesn’t waste a single scene. This is part of what makes Crazxy good – its tempo and design. A lot of the film’s tension – both in scenes with immediate consequences and the ones with a longer payout – feels like a crescendo and, for the most part, Kohli is an expert conductor.
The decision to focus the entire film almost completely on a single character is smart and it’s smarter still that the makers don’t use that as an excuse to skimp on talent.
Sohum Shah plays Abhimanyu Sood, a surgeon driving to his hospital with a bag of cash he needs for a settlement, when he gets a phone call claiming his daughter has been kidnapped. His assumption that it’s a prank call doesn’t just come from the spam call fatigue, it also comes from a subconscious realization that he isn’t present in his daughter’s life enough to be the person a kidnapper would call.
It’s an argument his ex-wife (an emotive Nimisha Sajayan) brings to the forefront during their call. And that’s where the film’s secondary and tertiary characters exist – in Abhimanyu’s phone. Kohli uses this device – in every sense of the word – for some of the film’s cheekier, pulpy moments. A lawyer and a doctor are saved as ‘black coat’ and ‘white coat’ and each person’s ringtone or caller-tune adds to their character.
The one-character thriller quickly becomes a moral lesson and throws in enough red herrings to keep you guessing the kidnapper’s identity. And just when you think you’re ready to write it off as predictable, the writing acknowledges the predictability and reveals the identity. The whodunit then transforms into a whydunnit and the entire time, the film hasn’t missed a single beat, keeping you at the edge of your seat (the rhyme is unintentional but no complaints).
From the get-go Abhimanyu is never presented as a particularly moral man, his personal life is littered with evidence of his multiple shortcomings. One in particular is the film’s crux, his dismissal of his daughter because she was born with Down’s Syndrome (the ‘X’ in the title makes more sense now).
As the clock keeps ticking, Abhimanyu – performed with a surgical precision by Shah – keeps making frustrating decisions, often moving in a loop. The writing chops are especially evident in the way his doubt starts to fall away with each conversation he has on his phone. With every passing moment, you can see how he gradually stops looking for ways out and insists on pushing himself to the limit instead – disbelief is replaced by a subconscious need to punish himself for his past deeds.
The conversations he has with people over the phone, while sometimes bordering on heavy exposition are otherwise well-balanced. Even the shortest conversations reveal things about Sood and the person he is talking to. However, his conversations with his girlfriend are the weakest – in no part due to the performances, Shilpa Shukla is equal parts alluring and biting. The resolution feels a little too convenient, we don’t get enough time to understand her character or make sense of her reactions.
This weakness is balanced out by the strength in the calls between Sood and the kidnapper – it’s increasingly confusing and that only makes the thriller better. However, towards the second half, once he gets closer to this destination, the film becomes a little implausible and clunky.
The suspension of logic expected of the viewer becomes too glaring to ignore. While I’ve rarely said this about a film, Crazxy didn’t need a ‘big twist’ in the end. In fact, it would’ve benefited without it. The film doesn’t pull its punches while discussing the protagonist’s moral conundrum and failures but towards the end, it comes across slightly gimmicky.
Sood has had his redemption arc with or without the ending – the film’s goal has already been achieved. And if the film’s craft wasn’t so disarmingly impressive I would’ve been hung up more on the ending.
But the sheer skill required to make a film like this is difficult to ignore. While Shah’s physical acting does the heavy lifting required to keep a single person thriller engaging, the credit also goes to the sound design, background score, and the cinematography. The camerawork (courtesy directors of photography Sunil Ramkrishna Borkar and Kuldeep Mamania) speaks of the film’s attention to detail – whether it’s capturing a car stumbling through vast, barren land or zooming out to a wide shot that shows you how ‘trapped’ he physically is.
The background score and the film’s choice of music could’ve felt a little on-the-nose but it’s a testament to the film’s design and expert editing that it becomes evocative instead; the inclusion of ‘Abhimanyu Chakravyuh Mein’ (from Inquilaab) is particularly inspired and one can’t fault the inclusion of ‘Goli Maar Bheje Mein’ from Satya either.
The film’s first half finds such an impressive tonal balance between the poignant and the haunting and the hilarious that you try to keep that investment going into the second half as well. Perhaps from a selfish need to satisfy the part of you that’s now rooting for the family.
It’s really a pity that Crazxy seems to unravel the way it does towards the end because it’s quite a brave undertaking. For the most part it impresses and when it disappoints, you still can’t help but think about the former.