In one of the early scenes in Prakash Kovelamudiâs Judgementall Hai Kya (earlier titled Mental Hai Kya), Kangana Ranautâs Bobby, a dubbing artist, smacks a guy at the dubbing studio, potentially jeopardising future gigs. Her manager, whoâs also her on-off boyfriend, tells her, âKoi kaam nahi dene wala tujhe.â The one time she does land a job, he warns her, âStudio jala ke mat aana.â
Given the numerous controversies surrounding Ranaut (most recently, she went on a tirade against a PTI reporter), itâs impossible not to read this scene as self-referential, a meta moment where Ranaut the star is having fun being Ranaut the actor, harnessing her real-life adventures into a fictional narrative, bringing a self-awareness that makes the visual experience of Judgementall Hai Kya surreal.
The Kanika Dhillon-penned film, the story of a character suffering from acute psychosis, is laced with several meta moments. A film within a film, called Zara, is shown as being produced by Shailesh Singh, the co-producer of Judgementall and a number of other Ranaut films. Bobbyâs house has her pictures but they arenât just any pictures, they are stills from Ranautâs past films such as Tanu Weds Manu and Queen. When Bobby struggles to get gigs, she complains, âKaise kaise logon ko yahan kaam mil jaaata hai,â repeating a criticism sheâs often made in real life, about Bollywood being a nepotistic and unfair industry.
More urgently, Bobby being branded a âmad womanâ in the movie echoes and exposes the soft whispers within Bollywood around Ranaut herself and her relentlessness in picking fights. Is Ranaut responding to a cultural environment thatâs hellbent on branding her as unhinged?
Even discounting the possible real-life connections, Judgementall Hai Kya is quite unlike anything Bollywood has experimented with.
While Hollywood has made a prototype out of the unreliable female narrator (Gone Girl, Sharp Objects), this hasnât been fully explored in Hindi films. In Judgementall, Bobby has an unreliable mind and her version of events cannot be trusted. Sheâs yet to process her childhood trauma and projects her paranoia on those around her. When Keshav (Rajkummar Rao) and his wife move in as tenants in her house, Ranautâs suspicions and delusions reach self-destructive heights after she accuses him of murder.
How the two outwit each other and the viewer forms the crux of the story, which paces around with a trippy, electrifying energy.
Visually, the film employs a kitschy colour palette which goes neatly with its mythological undertones. Sitaâs victimhood is invoked rather frequently and the lines between Ram and Ravan keep blurring, suggesting that male violence towards women isnât confined to just one of them. The bro code is universal.
The tonal consistency of the film is remarkable. Even when the drama shifts from Mumbai to London, the visuals rearrange themselves as Bobbyâs house in the UK slowly stars metamorphosing to resemble her Mumbai apartment. The filmâs unhurried cinematography (Pankaj Kumar) carries a sense of impending doom but whatâs most fascinating is the way it straddles genres. The minute things get dark and edgy (and they get really dark and edgy), theyâre defused with humour and sarcasm. But the language of horror is present even in the sarcasm.
Bobby is no stock femme fatale. Sheâs a spinning top. As a woman perennially on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Ranaut is outstanding as Bobby, disappearing into the troubled mind of a deranged woman. As Ranaut embodies a character so awfully sad and tragic, one almost wants to be a voice in her head and tell her that itâs going to be all right. The world isnât out there to get you and that that your persecution complex is misplaced.
Is it, though?
Rajkummar Rao is reliably good as the hyper-sexualised Keshav and straddles between being the ideal husband and the manipulative dude bro. Dhillonâs writing makes our sympathies constantly shift from Bobby to Keshav, throwing us into constant moral conflict until the filmâs graphic, violent final act, when things come into sharp focus.
However, despite sharp performances and a unique screenplay, Judgementall Hai Kya isnât without its flaws. The coincidences in the film are one too many, the pace dips towards the second half, and the scenes where Ranaut sees the physical manifestations of the voices in her head drag on. Jimmy Shergillâs cameo, too, appears half-baked and hurriedly weaved in.
While these shortcomings hamper the overall experience of an otherwise solid film, they donât take away from its central idea.
At its core, Judgementall Hai Kya tells a vital story about the pervasiveness of domestic violence and the fact that often, the victim isnât just the woman at the receiving end of that violence, but also those who witness it intimately, internalising the angst, grief and trauma, which ultimately percolates and wreaks havoc into their lives.