‘Kadak Singh’ Review: Impressive Performances Try To Elevate a Middling Thriller

'Kadak Singh', starring Pankaj Tripathi, is streaming on Zee5.

Pankaj Tripathi in a still from Kadak Singh.

(Photo Courtesy: YouTube)

One man, AK Shrivastava (Pankaj Tripathi), an officer investigating a financial fraud case, wakes up in a hospital with retrograde amnesia and meets a girl, Sakshi (Sanjana Sanghi) who tells him she’s his daughter. Sakshi is tasked with helping her father remember important details about his life and about the leads he has been pursuing in the case. 

Pankaj Tripathi in a still from Kadak Singh.

But retrograde amnesia is not the only screenwriters’ favourite trope used in Kadak Singh. The writers also employ the riveting Rashomon effect – different people walk into AK’s hospital room to tell him their version of events. Other than his daughter, his colleague Arjun (Paresh Pahuja) and senior Tyagi (Dilip Shankar) come to visit and so does a woman named Naina (Jaya Ahsan) who is supposedly the woman he’s seeing after his wife’s passing.

To top things off, there’s his nurse (Parvathy Thiruvothu), a spectator to AK’s story, a character that has as much information as the viewers do and acts as a sounding board for AK’s theories.

A still from Kadak Singh.

The film’s first half impressively paints the portrait of a man who has a fractured relationship with his daughter – he can’t wrap his head around the man his daughter sees him as. The nuances to a character like this are many and Pankaj Tripathi captures them all brilliantly.

AK watches the people that come and go from his room with a skeptical glee, intrigued more than convinced, and its Tripathi's ease of understanding his characters that adds to the character's allure.

Sanghi, who gets a meaty role in Kadak Singh, proves her mettle as an actor in every scene. For the longest time, she feels like the film’s anchor and the credit for that goes both to the writing and the performance. 

To explore the intricacies of human relationships, trust, and grief with the investigation of a white-collar crime investigation in the backdrop is not an easy task. For a premise as layered as this, Kadak Singh or AK’s character isn’t. As the story unfolds, every piece of the puzzle seems to click in place on its own – the tension never becomes nearly as gripping as it could have.

The main reason is because the makers don’t let the protagonist confidently enter gray territory – he’s a righteous man with a perfect record and is dealing with a grief so large that it makes him a shadow to his own children.

Sanjana Sanghi in a still from Kadak Singh.

The trauma that shrouds the family is too one-dimensional to make a proper impact which is a pity because Sakshi and Naina’s versions in this Rashomon tale are the most gripping. The film feels well-intentioned and all its messaging is firmly in place but there’s a hesitancy to delve deeper into the themes than through just mere words. 

But how else has he dealt with the grief of losing his wife? How has the guilt of the nature of his relationship with his family affected him? Furthermore, the truth about their mother’s passing is distressing to say the least but the children seemingly brush over the implications with nary a second thought. 

To their credit, however, the way director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury and writer Ritesh Shah unravel the film’s main mystery is interesting enough that, when combined with the impressive performances, you won’t feel like completely abandoning the film. But by the time the truth is revealed, it has become predictable; there are no twists or turns to grapple with. 

Pankaj Tripathi in a still from Kadak Singh.

Kadak Singh isn’t as impressive in execution as it is in its premise but if you want something to pass the time on a slow weekend, it’ll be good company.