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Feature Name: Haseen Dillruba
Cast: Taapsee Pannu, Vikrant Massey, Harshvardhan Rane
Directed by: Vinil Mathew
OTT: Netflix
The plot of Haseen Dillruba focuses around an industrious engineer, his feisty wife, her handsome lover, and a prejudiced police officer. Vinil Mathew’s latest Netflix film, Hasee Toh Phasee, says that love isn’t truly love until it’s amour fou – wild, passionate, and reckless.
Rani (Taapsee Pannu) and Rishu (Vikrant Massey) are brought together by an arranged marriage, but they are not on the same page. She enjoys gruesome pulp novels and is a big believer in sexual adventure. He’s a straight-laced gent without a hair out of place or a crease in his clothes.
Rishu is enamoured with Rani at first sight and ignores his mother’s severe warnings. The saas is correct about Rani’s sass, but Rishu, who believes in the slow-and-steady approach to the finish line, feels it will work.
Unfortunately for Rishu and the film, which pretends to be a mystery but spends much too much time on soap operatics, Rani is a bride from hell.
Incompatibility, infidelity, and death drive the marriage apart, resulting in Rani’s arrest at a police station. There, she must explain a blast in her house that has left just one relic: Rishu’s hand. In which had his wife’s name tattooed on it.
Kishore (Aditya Srivastava), the investigating officer, is unmoved by Rani’s teary eyes and trembling professions of love for Rishu. Did she do him in by plotting with her lover? There are greater riddles at work in Haseen Dillruba, such as the uneven tone, the mistimed black humour, the undeveloped characters, and the notion that romance must touch on kinship in order to thrive.
Kanika Dhillon wrote the script for the film, and her previous writings for Manmarziyaan and Judgementall Hai Kya took a stand against gaslighting and championed unhappy women who deviated from tradition and unfulfilling relationships.
Rani is shown as a victim of the gulf between imagination and reality in Haseen Dillruba as well, despite driving her husband to the brink of insanity.
This small-town Madame Bovary, saddled with an incompetent spouse, a meddling mother-in-law, and a father-in-law with a receding manner and a weird hairstyle, falls into the epilated arms of Rishab’s cousin Neel (Harshvardhan Rane).
The pleasures of the flesh are featured in different ways in Haseen Dillruba, leading to a predictable conclusion for the astute observer.
The screenplay wiggles for much too long before landing on its themes of sexual desire and complex love. The developing relationship between Rishu and Rani is less fascinating than the whodunit.
The film is just sufficient as a character study of two mismatched individuals who learn to calibrate their responses to each other the hard way.
However, the film bridges its own gap between anticipation and execution. In the latter sequences starring Vikrant Massey and Taapsee Pannu.
The majority of the cast members are constellations in a film that revolves on its volatile leads. Harshvardhan Rane has nothing to do, while Aditya Srivastava wastes his time playing the very suspicious police officer.
When the narrative twists overwhelm the family relations, Yamini Das and Daya Shankar Pandey, who play Rishu’s parents, lose their importance.
This misfired amour fou’s throbbing heart is not the lady for whom sympathy is sought. As the repressed husband whose suppressed passion takes a sinister turn, Vikrant Massey is fascinating.
Massey’s nuanced examination of Rishu’s grief and brutality clearly outperforms his co-attempts star’s While Rani seldom wears the same dress again, Taapsee Pannu has a limited repertoire of looks and actions.
