Pankaj Tripathi is enough to hold the film together
Rarely does a Ponzi scheme investigator face such a tough test as the tough but indomitable hero. Kadak Singh Against him he is a man from the past but he has no memories. As he recovers in a hospital, he takes it upon himself to put the scattered pieces back together with the help of others’ memories.
National Award-winning director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s third Hindi film (Later pink And is lost) is now under investigation into a chit fund scam, which has netted countless lower middle class investors. It’s a real jigsaw puzzle with big pieces missing.
The case of the missing millions is not unusual, nor is it the way it is presented. It’s the sleuth’s fragile mindset that sets the procedural apart from others of its kind. But slow and steady Kadak Singh Not a whodunit that jumps out of your mind.
Ritesh Shah’s screenplay, along with a story he wrote with the director and Viraf Sarkari, employs a fragmented, multi-perspective structure where the chain of events is seen and processed through the eyes of four characters. It reaches its conclusion when the hero has heard enough to be able to offset the blackout of his memory.
Kadak SinghStreaming on Zee5, step back in time and space. It gives the impression of being repetitive and circuitous. A group of people who have seen the man up close – his daughter, a few colleagues and a friend – give their personal impressions of protagonist Arun Kumar (AK) Srivastava (Pankaj Tripathi).
A.K., an officer of the Kolkata unit of a financial crime investigation agency, is diagnosed with retrograde amnesia. He does not recognize those around him or remember the details of the investigation he led.
His delicate state of mind was the result of neurological damage caused by an alleged suicide attempt. But what exactly happened the day it was taken to a hospital is shrouded in mystery. He obviously doesn’t remember anything.
AK Hospital is in the capable hands of the hawkish, chatty head nurse Miss Kannan (Parvathy Thiruvothu), the only person in her immediate circle whom she now recognizes because she is part of her current reality. Everyone else has receded into the background.
He is in a constant relationship with a widow’s daughter, his boss, a trusted junior colleague and a woman visiting his ward one by one – he has no idea who they are anymore. However, he returns to the ‘story’ they tell and tries to find out who he is and how he ended up in the hospital.
In its opening moments Kadak SinghAK walks into a seedy suburban hotel hand in hand with a young woman There, he chances upon a girl (Sanjana Sanghi), who is visibly shocked to see him. He fled the area. Arun chases her out of the building.
Cut to the hospital bed, where she has a visitor. The girl he ran into in the first sequence. She introduces herself as her daughter Sakshi. AK looks at him blankly. He claims that he has only one child – a five-year-old son.
The unprepared girl tells AK that he made a mistake. He does have a son but he is now a teenager. He narrates her story in an attempt to awaken her ‘memory’ and convince her that she is his biological daughter.
The girl even tells him why he is Kadak Singh for her children. Prudent to a fault and a perfectionist with no patience for slip-ups, she lets these traits influence her parenting style.
Thus begins a series of interactions. Naina (Jaya Ahsan), a woman Arun has probably been in love with since before he lost his wife in an accident for which his children blame him, is the next visitor.
He provides another window into a past that has been erased from its mind. Naina’s reminiscences, like the others who call out to her in later scenes, help her overcome the disfigurement she has suffered, as well as help the audience understand what is happening to the man and around him.
AK’s boss Jitender Tyagi (Dilip Shankar) is followed by another colleague in the department, Arjun (Paresh Pahuja), a man AK’s children refer to as a “real son”, so he takes a liking to him. From their separate fog-lifting perspectives, the two men recall what happened leading up to the incident that led to AK being rushed to the hospital.
Kadak Singh It is a family drama, a white-collar crime story and an investigative thriller. It’s not the kind of pulsating, seat-of-the-seat fare that one would go to the ends of the earth to see, but it does have a few passages that work well enough to be gently turned around, thanks in particular to Pankaj Tripathi’s restrained, if somewhat limited, performance.
The mystery of AK’s hospitalization is his strange, difficult-to-quantify behavior, which often raises the question: Is there more to his behavior than meets the eye? What answers does his memory loss hide that he must find in order to get out of the maze that the sudden turn of events has thrown him into.
Despite its silent approach, Kadak Singh Sometimes, life springs up, riding on the complexity of the case that AK was investigating until its progress is interrupted and the act of remembering and forgetting creates surprises and makes connections between disparate parts of memory that slowly begin to come together. little and take the form of a coherent whole.
The role played by Pankaj Tripathi doesn’t push him far from his comfort zone but he does enough to hold the film together. The actors around him – Jaya Ahsan, Sanjana Sanghi, Dilip Shankar and Paresh Pahuja – have largely reactive roles, as they are physically and creatively confined to confined spaces.
not at all moaning Kadak Singh If its edges were sharp, it would have more tensile strength.
