Infamous Five

CAST: Kalki Koechlin,Rajeev Khandelwal,Neil Bhoopalam,Gulshan Devaiya,Kirti Kulhari,Pavan Malhotra,Raj Kumar Yadav

Rating: **1/2

Five young people who only want to have fun are suddenly,in one fell stroke,forced to confront the darkness within. Shaitan is a mixed bag of a movie,starting off with a bang,and then petering out,not getting where it sets out to go.

The build-up in this debut is assured,as new kid in town Amy aka Amrita Jaishankar (Koechlin) is invited into the closed circle of a Mumbai cool-kids gang,comprising a girl who’s forced into being a model by her greedy sister,a geeky Parsi in spectacles,a richie- rich fellow and a nicely-muscled fellow (Kulhari,Bhoopalam,Devaiya). As all gangs do,this one too has rituals,the chief among them being an ability to “trust” one another whatever happens: it could be a leap from a terrace into the blue,or a breathless ride to the wild side.

The director knows what he is doing as he goes about setting the scene: the loose,rapid conversational exchanges amongst kids who spend a lot of time doing nothing,the desire to get high on life with a little bit of help from friends,and other substances which can be rolled and smoked and snorted,the insistence on sticking only to the fast lane,and the horrific realisation that all the sensation comes at a huge,heart-stopping cost.

The first half of Shaitan is a non-stop whirl,which is how it should be in a film like this,giddy with the speed and excitement provided by hand-held cameras,and edgy background riffs. But the film goes off track when lives start unravelling: a conflicted cop’s (Khandelwal) attempts at cracking the disappearance of Amy and her gang are interspersed with him trying to deal with a disintegrating marriage,and a corrupt junior (Yadav) and a confused senior (Malhotra). The switch in tone is disconcerting: where’s all the shaitani gone?

These fresh-faced kids are all right,but they are more sketches than filled-out people you want to care about: you never get a sense of a darkness that is waiting to engulf them. Anurag Kashyap,who’s produced Shaitan,made the unreleased Paanch on a similar theme: in that film,you could feel the suffocation and the sense of disintegration as a real,palpable thing. Shaitan needed to have been darker,edgier to have had the same impact.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com