NH10 Review: It is praiseworthy to watch one time for chills and thrills with several heart-in-your-mouth moments and a terrific performance of Anushka Sharma.

NH10 is praiseworthy to watch one time for chills and thrills with several heart-in-your-mouth moments and a terrific performance of Anushka Sharma.

  

When you are encountered with mortal danger, you can either fight or flee. NH 10 takes us on a voyage in which both fleeing and fighting struggle for space, till the time comes to stop running.

  

NH10, a movie which has been projected as an action thriller, is really a new kind of horror affair where fears continues to lurk from every hook and corner with real humans, and not ghosts, threaten to horrify you out of your skin.

When young, good-looking, urban professional Meera (Anushka Sharma) urges her husband (Neil Bhoopalam) to run away from the men who are terrorizing them, she is doing what impulsively comes to most of us. When she turns around to face the enemy, we want to cheer. Because this is a lone woman in a man’s world, the kind of world where women are killed before they are born, or dumped, after they draw their first breath, in rubbish bins. It is the land of the Khaps, where caste and gender determine whether you will live or die. Or, worse, how you will live and die.

A couple on a road trip, towards a romantic destination. They go off track and get lost. Something terrible happens. A crazed killer (or a bunch of them) on the prowl, the couple make a run for it, all leading up to a pyrrhic ending. It’s been done before thousands of times in cinema; but unless you count Ram Gopal Varma’s Road, it’s never been done before in Bollywood. Director Navdeep Singh serves up the first taste of the slasher road trip genre in NH10, and the results are pretty good.

NH10 is not an easy movie to watch. In a ghost flick, you can still afford to sneak out a nervous laughter because you know that it is mainly make believe. But how do you erase that tension which arises out of real situations, where as an audience you are as much a part of the journey that Anushka Sharma and Neil Bhoopalam take on NH10?

For NH10, Singh, who directed the excellent Manorama Six Feet Under (which borrowed a few bits from Chinatown), takes plentiful helpings of the British thriller Eden Lake. The basic plotline remains the same – urban husband and wife heading towards a countryside birthday destination are plunged into a cat and mouse game with a bunch of cutthroat rural locals. A lot of blood spills from both sides. Instead of Fassbender and Kelly Reilly, we have Neil Bhoopalam and Anushka Sharma on the run, and the villains have been switched from weird rednecks to regressive North Indians villagers.

NH10 makes for a gritty, gruesome, disturbing and haunting movie watching affair, as director Navdeep Singh makes good use of technology at his disposal (background score, sound design, cinematography, editing) to ensure effective storytelling.

It is not as much as cuss words as violence - both physical and mental - which makes NH10 a really dark affair. There is no respite whatever from the very opening scene of the movie itself when Anushka and Neil drive around the roads of the Millennium City on a dark-cold night. You know that the glitz would soon make way for the bloodshed and wholesome brutality that would follow, where you don't doubt for one minute that the end result would certainly not be pleasant.

On the performance front, Anushka Sharma is so much convincing and perfect in the most challenging role of her career so far and opens up altogether different prospects for herself as an actor. Neil Bhoopalam is appealing in his part that where he does make one feel for him to have taken a life threatening impulsive step.

Darshan Kumaar may not have as much screen time as Mary Kom but his haunting presence fills up every frame once he arrives on screen first. Another actor who just makes you hate her right from scene one is Deepti Naval. From being a stereotypical mother role (as she was in another Gurgaon based film Aurangzeb), the veteran actress is seen maybe in her first ever violent character.

 NH10 is not a blaring, loud movie that caricatures women empowerment. This is the movie that lets its silences stun you. It finally breaks the ‘damsel in distress’ stereotype by showing a woman standing up against rapey mobsters with an iron rod. It’s unsettling, and it’s refreshing as hell.

There’s a scene where Sharma’s character Meera places her weapon aside, casually lights a cigarette and finishes it slowly, before finishing off a goon. The violence is actually more subtle than you expect it to be, partly because it is executed maturely and partly because we get ghastlier, bloodier, more eye crushingly vicious U-rated movies on a regular basis.

There are a few debatable lapses in logic, like when the couple uses a map chart instead of Google Maps on their expensive iPhones, and still lose their way. At times, the movie overdoes it and keeps telling you ‘North India is full of horrible people’, because everyone in the film is seemingly out to kill the couple. Yes, some of the patriarchal rubbish in this country needs to be addressed, but does every man in the movie need to be antagonistic to convey the point? Some scenes set in the dark look fake because of the artificial lighting. The songs, barring the end credits, are dissonantly out of sync with the tone of the movie – they were visibly shoehorned in for commercial purposes.

  

In general, it is worthy to watch once for chills and thrills with several heart-in-your-mouth moments and a terrific performance of Anushka Sharma.