Film review| Pikhaas: A Shocking Tale of Love, Lust, and Murder
The Story:
It’s a new day for Maya (played by Jeanette Bay) as she joins her elder sister’s college in Assam. The day is young, and so is she. As with all students with striking looks and an urban sense of style, Maya quickly becomes the center of attention in her college. Nirupom Saikia plays Danuj, who is the student union leader of the college. He befriends Maya and then obsessively falls in love with her. But on the other hand, Maya develops a romantic interest in a much older art teacher (played by Sasanka Samir) of the same college. Meanwhile, Achinta Raj Kashyap plays Mohit, a photographer and a psychotic boyfriend of Maya’s elder sister (played by Tribeni Gogoi). In a terrible twist of fate, Mohit also starts getting consumed by the beauty of Maya. He then provokes Danuj to act against Maya and the art teacher. As his jealousy and anger reach its peak, Danuj’s obsession with Maya leads him down a dark path and he resorts to ultimate violence and force to eliminate his rival.
What’s Good?
With the destructive power of anger, hatred, obsession and jealousy at its centre, Pikhaas reveals how these emotions can push individuals towards insanity and force them to commit horrific acts of crime. Such acts ultimately lead the characters to their downfall.
Pikhaas is unexpectedly brutal by a fair share for an Assamese film to be. The violence is visceral and unsettling. There are some elaborate graphic scenes and bold content which might be horrifying for audiences less exposed to adult themes, and blood and gore in cinema. Therefore, Pikhaas rightfully received an Adults Only (A) film certification from the CBFC making it one of the few Assamese films to have received this exclusive rating over the years. But all these violence, blood and gore don’t help the film achieve the standard that the theme promises.
The following movie review of Pikhaas contains major spoilers. Read at your own risk!
Weak Script and Character Development
The film's primary weaknesses lie in its character development and the script. When a film is titled Pikhaas and the trailer reveals how anger, jealousy, and hatred can dehumanize individual beings, there are a number of internal, interpersonal, moral, social and philosophical conflicts that deserve to be written into the script so that the actions of the characters flow organically from point A to point E. Instead, the script directly jumps from A to E, skipping the dilemma and consequences of B, C, and D in between.
To explain it differently, the first step should have been about the loss of self-control of the characters. Secondly, focus should have been given to how feelings of rejection or betrayal can amplify negative emotions and how repressed emotions and grudges can slowly diminish a person's sense of humanity.
The third step should have been about making the characters adopt a morally questionable behaviour. And finally, with further denial and lack of recognition of their efforts, their ultimate psychological breakdown should have followed. But instead of this, the film takes a direct leap from the setup to the ultimate moral degradation of the characters.
For example, today the character meets Maya, tomorrow he is already in love with her. Today Danuj gets to know about Maya’s feelings for her teacher, in the next two days, he already stabs the art teacher and kills him. There was no time for his rationality to erode. And this approach ultimately translated the characters in the film to people who are simply born merciless and deranged (and remember this is not a biopic of some serial killer to deserve that treatment). Even films like Animal (2023) relied on character development to reach the ultimate violent side of an individual. Sadly, the transformation of how a person turned from civilized to violent was not much worked upon in Pikhaas. It is only in the character of Maya’s elder sister that the writer-director Amit Rag has succeeded in cultivating some justifiable amount of anger, hatred and rebelliousness. All other characters appeared flat.
Shortcut Storytelling
The screenplay of Pikhaas relied a bit too much on shortcuts, which lead to the resolutions being shaped according to the convenience of the writer. For example, how did Danuj find Maya and her teacher while searching for them with the intent to kill? How did Mohit discover that Maya was being held at Danuj’s secluded farmhouse, especially since its location was not revealed? Also, how did the police manage to locate the farmhouse later on? These inconsistencies suggest that the screenplay prioritized convenience over logical continuity, resulting in a narrative that seemed to be deliberately manufactured around the acts of violence. The panic-fuelled characters act foolishly on purpose. Their decisions are infantile by design.
This is why some of the bold parts in the film felt forceful. Because it seemed as though the writer had imagined the number of bold and violent sequences first and then constructed a story around it unsuccessfully trying to connect them together. And the film also tried to connect multiple genres but not in a good way. What begins as a teenage love story quickly evolves into a toxic tale of love. As the story proceeds with one girl caught between two boys, the film turns into the obsessive and violent depths of unrequited love. It then shifts into a chamber drama before veering subtly into the slasher territory. It's as if Gaspar Noé had directed a mashup of Mera Pehla Pehla Pyaar (2007), Darr (1993), Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016) and Green Room (2015). And the fact that it tries to be everything makes it a very unsatisfactory and frustrating watch.
Violence as a Solution to Every Problem
To prove its point about human savagery, the film also resorted to violence as a catch-all solution to every problem. Feeling unhappy? Just kill the person you blame. Worked hard but didn’t get what you deserved? Just kill the person responsible. Given missing character arcs and dramatic depths, the film’s over reliance on violence as a solution ultimately reduced it to a senseless spectacle of gore. While slashers and horror movies, especially those involving teenagers and young adults, are typically not noted for their philosophical strength, the best examples in the genre manage to integrate interesting storylines, character development and meaningful themes with their portrayal of violence.
Identity Crisis
Moreover, there is a lack of a clear point-of-view in the film. The trailer positions Maya as the central character but the film tries to subject the audiences to the perspective of all four of its characters. And it’s not a wrong thing to do. However, with the frequent shifting of story beats and genre, the film failed to justify all four perspectives even at a 2 hour 14 minutes runtime.
It is a difficult task to show multiple points of view in a film without undermining a few in the process. But it’s even more difficult when all four of the characters are equally disturbed and irrational. In such a scenario, there is the demand for a more fleshed-out explanation of the minds and conditions of each character which was missing in Pikhaas. I don’t mind that Pikhaas tries to show the story of so many characters but I mind that it handles that weight so poorly that it crashes the film.
Imagine a movie featuring the stories of Raman Raghav, Jeffrey Dahmer, Patrick Bateman, and Joe Goldberg (or Will Bettelheim/ Jonathan Moore) together. With only a 2-hour runtime, it's hard to give each of their stories adequate attention. This is precisely the issue with Pikhaas. Each character in the movie had its own standalone story. Maya had her own narrative (a young girl who has returned to Assam, abandoning her studies elsewhere, is now seeking excitement in her new college), Danuj had his own story (a college union leader who is willing to go to extreme lengths to either prove his love or seek revenge for rejection), Mohit had his (a psychotic and toxic individual secretly obsessed with his girlfriend’s sister), and the conflict involving Maya's elder sister, Mohit, and her stepmother is yet another story. And no story is lesser than the other. All the characters are equally insane in their own way.
Pikhaas squeezed in all of these stories together and made each story a sub-plot of the other resulting in unequal and fragmented emphasis. Hence, the film had to do away with character growth and take narrative jumps from A to E (as mentioned above). After committing multiple crimes, we are given a one-liner explanation towards the end of the film as to why Danuj behaved the way he did - Danuj grew up without a mother, and his father was too absorbed in his business to care for him much. Danuj had all the wealth he could desire, but he lacked the touch of love. When he tried to find love in Maya's arms and faced rejection, it drove him to the brink of madness. Yes, it’s flimsy but then that’s it. Maya’s elder sister suffers from mistreatment at the hands of her stepmother – a classic troupe of evil step mothers being cruel and unfair. How can it not work? It’s flimsy but then that’s it.
Pikhaas therefore comes across as rather a formulaic film, featuring a basic plot and characters that are solely defined by their anger, madness, and rebelliousness. It can make one uncomfortable but it has very little to say about its themes which ultimately makes it an unmemorable experience for those seeking more than the sum of its parts.