Agra movie review: Kanu Behl crafts a bleak, claustrophobic portrait of toxic masculinity

Guru (Mohit Agarwal) lives with his mother (Vibha Chibber) on the ground floor of their house; his father (Rahul Roy) lives on the first floor with his new woman (Sonal Jha), and within a few moments of the film’s opening, we are face to face with the consequences of all-round repression, physical, sexual, mental. Guru’s life is circumscribed by his inability to get it on, whether it is online sexting, or finding refuge in his bathroom.

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Behl uses sex both as rancid fantasy and liberation in tightly-contested small-town spaces, and for just that Agra becomes a film you cannot dismiss. The average young man without any prospects– living with an overbearing father with elevated levels of libido– who has been unable to find an outlet for his own urges is a very specific creature, and both the actor and director have done a fine job in the creation of Guru.

The women in the film are as drowned in ugly helplessness, with both Chibber and Jha discovering that they are two sides of the same coin when their man does after a new one. A young niece who becomes an addition to the household comes with her own set of problems; an older one (Priyanka Bose, excellent) with a game leg, becomes Guru’s release and unlikely anchor, setting him on the path to possible selfhood.

Behl holds on to faces and scenes longer than he needs to; he has already made his point. The unusual choice of Rahul Roy as the slovenly father is underlined when the popular Aashiqui song nazar ke saamne is played for almost its entire length. While that could be a deliberate stylistic choice (I don’t remember it being quite so insistent in Titli), it adds to the feeling of excessive claustrophobia. Bleakness is a mood, but the breathing spaces come in quite late, and Agra suffers from this excess.

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It also never quite ends up telling us why it is called Agra. You don’t want a glimpse of the monuments that the town is famous for, but the places the film spends its time in could belong to any of the crowded small towns in UP, or for that matter, in the North Indian belt.

Agra movie cast: Mohit Agarwal, Rahul Roy, Vibha Chibber, Sonal Jha, Priyanka Bose, Ruhani Sharma, Aanchal Goswami, Sudhir Gulyani
Agra movie director: Kanu Behl
Agra movie rating: Two and a half stars