Love Hostel: Bobby Deol went Animal-mode in Shanker Raman’s slept-on thriller, and nobody noticed

Love Hostel makes the best possible use of Deol’s skills, casting him as a silent assassin named Dagar — a cross between the Terminator and John Wick. Like Keanu Reeves’ hitman, Dagar also lives by a code, appears to have risen from the dead, and has a doggy companion who tags along with him. What he doesn’t have is a single redeemable quality. Dagar is a cold-blooded killer who goes on a remorseless rampage through the course of the film, leaving at least 50 dead bodies in his wake.

He justifies his actions by convincing himself that he is a social servant out to put people on the path to righteousness. But despite having the deadest of eyes that often peer out from behind a pair of plain glasses, he isn’t a mindless murderer. Dagar is hired by a politician in Haryana to track down her granddaughter (played by Sanya Malhotra), who has eloped with a Muslim man (played by Vikrant Massey) and been sent to a safe-house by the court. Unfolding like a chase thriller with hints of True Romance and Badlands, Love Hostel gives Deol arguably the best role of his career, positioning him as the embodiment of all the hate, the bigotry and misguided rage that our country has been encouraging in recent years..

Despite his bulky stature, Deol appears to glide in and out of rooms. Without moving a muscle on his face, he manages to convey disgust at the very idea of love. Damaged beyond redemption, Dagar kills not out of a misplaced sense of justice, but out of pure, unfiltered anger at what he sees as a personal betrayal. His actions don’t evoke empathy, but understanding his core emotions, which are all rather basic, certainly humanises him to a point — he isn’t a caricature, but an actual character.

For most of the film’s lean 100-minute run time, Dagar’s name is invoked with a sense of fear, almost as if he is an otherworldly spirit. His exploits are the stuff of legend; locals shiver at the very mention of his name. In an early scene, Dagar gets a tankful of free fuel for his Thar when the gas station employees recognise him, and react almost as if they’re Boobians themselves. Nobody who has the misfortune of crossing paths with him can imagine coming out alive. Dagar probably doesn’t do dinners. If he arrives at your doorstep, it’s likely to kill you with a headshot between the eyes. In carefully paced sequences of mayhem, Raman establishes the unstoppable force of nature that the character is. And it helps that Deol fills up the frame every time he saunters into it.

The arc that Dagar is given in the movie is in stark tonal contrast to the A plot, which follows forbidden lovers Jyoti and Ahmed on a sprint to survival. These scenes highlight the actors’ easy chemistry — we aren’t shown how they fell in love; and flashbacks are just that, flashes into the past and not entire movies in themselves. Raman trusts Massey and Malhotra’s performances to tell us everything that we need to know about Jyoti and Ahmed’s relationship, and it works. More movies ought to rely on the audience and the actors to fill in the gaps. And trust, as it turns out, is the key to extracting excellent performances. Barring the one scene at the end in which Dagar expresses emotion for the first time — Love Hostel would’ve survived without it, in all honesty — Deol has no choice but to surrender to the film’s demands, if only to satisfy any ‘what ifs’ he might have had in his mind. What if this movie works? What if it gives me the image makeover I’ve been craving?

For far too long, Indian actors of a certain generation have been trapped in a cycle of mediocrity that restricts both their own progress and that of culture as a whole. And when movies like Love Hostel — pulp masala entertainment at its best, literally produced by Shah Rukh Khan — don’t get the attention they deserve, performers such as Deol often see this as a sign to return to what has worked in the past. But Love Hostel made one thing clear, if filmmaking is war, Bobby Deol should never be used as the gatling gun; he’s the hidden knife that you whip out when you’ve exhausted all your ammo.