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Akelli Review: Nushrratt Bharuccha Is A Damsel Pursued By Terrorists In Lacklustre FilmA woman trapped in a war-torn West Asian city is the lynchpin of Akelli, which tells a fictionalised story set in 2014. The protagonist demonstrates the tenacity of a Bharat ki beti (as she is described at the fag-end of the film) when she is taken captive by Islamic State terrorists in Mosul, Iraq. Left to fend for herself, she takes the fight to her brutal captors.
An ordinary Punjabi woman, Jyoti Arora (Nushrratt Bharuccha), and many of her female co-workers in a garments factory are herded into a van and taken to an ISIS hideout swarming with leering men. They are, unsurprisingly, lying in wait to pounce upon them.
The ringleader, Wahab Rahim (Fauda actor Amir Boutrous, who also played President Nasser in The Crown), ignores all the others and singles out the Indian girl. With nobody to turn to for help, the akelli woman must fend for herself and shake her tormentors off her back.
Akelli is co-written (with Gunjan Saxena and Ayush Tiwari) and directed by debutant Pranay Meshram. There isn't much in the screenplay that would suggest that the project has emanated from either exceptional research or exemplary intuition.
The film is hobbled by cliches not only of the escape thriller that it is but also of the geopolitical drama that it aspires to be. It rises to no great heights no matter which of the two generic labels you choose to put on AkellI.
As for its technical attributes, Akelli, filmed principally in Uzbekistan, is pretty solid, with director of photography Pushkar Singh making a fair fist of crafting frames and creating angles that enhance the efficacy of the tense moments, however rare. Unfortunately, the story lurches about in search of rhythm and only sporadically gets a grip on the essence of the struggle of a woman on the run.
What lets Akelli down is its inability to fully utilise the conventions of a tale of survival in exceedingly hostile terrain and infuse the narrative with a genuine sense of the damage that war wreaks on humanity. The film plays instead like a straightforward tale of an innocent caught in a battle that she has strayed into for no fault of her own.
As the damsel pursued by terrorists, Nushrratt Bharuccha swings between scaredy-cat vulnerability and dour-faced fortitude without quite succeeding in raising her game to a level that could have turned a generally competent performance into a truly memorable one.
She has two actors from the Israeli Netflix series Fauda, both cast as marauding antagonists, and Nishant Dahiya (as an Indian Muslim factory manager who takes a shine to Jyoti) for support, but the film's vapid core and predictable flow obviate the possibility of it ever springing to life and picking up momentum.
The script gives the three above-mentioned male actors little opportunity to carve a space for themselves in a single-note story that is too wrapped up in its desperate-damsel-in-the-desert scenario to notice the huge gaps in the script. Neither the bad guys nor the do-gooders are etched out well.
The dog whistles are all in here. As the factory women are brought into the ISIS hideout, the vicious commander of the terrorists declares that he feels he is in jannat (paradise), the obvious reference being to the hoorain (beautiful girls/angels) that are believed to be ordained for jihadists who lay down their lives in the defence of their religion.
That is not all. When Jyoti falls into the clutches of the debauched Assad (Tsahi Halevi, the second Fauda actor in the cast), he promptly announces that she will be his fourth begum. The plight of the women captured by ISIS and forced to be sex slaves is also underlined. Jyoti finds two teenaged girls who are held against their will in the evil man's mansion. She makes common cause with duo and stands up for them.
Wahab and Assad are maniacal, merciless monsters - both hateful caricatures that are more risible than fearsome - who stop at nothing to impose themselves on the meek. But, to be fair, Akelli isn't as screechy and strident as Bollywood films of this genre tend to be.
The ominous ISIS black flags are all around, but the victims, barring the female protagonist (who is the only one with a Hindu name in the garments factory), are all Muslims. Akelli does not harp so much on the religious identity that makes Jyoti a sitting duck in Mosul as on the tussle for control of land between ISIS and the Iraqi forces. It is another matter that the two inimical formations do not actually square off against each other during the course of the two-hour film.
Akelli focusses squarely on the story of Jyoti Arora and how the girl from a small north Indian town ends up in Mosul. Sacked from her job as a member of the ground staff at an airport after an altercation with a badly-behaved passenger, Jyoti is compelled to accept the position of a factory supervisor in a war zone.
On landing in Mosul, she witnesses an unwilling suicide bomber, a petrified pre-teen girl, blow herself up in the middle of a road. That is only the first of several explosions that occur in Akelli. Jyoti struggles to surmount the trauma of the opening encounter with a bit of help from her manager, Rafeeq (Nishant Dahiya), but even bigger trouble erupts even before she can settle into her job.
Chases across the dusty landscape, a few gunfights, a protracted cat and mouse game inside an airport terminal and a final dash across a tarmac engulfed in darkness are the action set pieces that Akelli assembles in a rather mechanical, if not entirely dreary, way. Much as it tries to steady itself, the film fumbles and falters.
This tale of a woman cornered and fighting for dear life had the potential to be a thrilling, edge-of-the-seat ripsnorter. It falls way, way short. The lacklustre Akelli is a film best left alone.
An ordinary Punjabi woman, Jyoti Arora (Nushrratt Bharuccha), and many of her female co-workers in a garments factory are herded into a van and taken to an ISIS hideout swarming with leering men. They are, unsurprisingly, lying in wait to pounce upon them.
The ringleader, Wahab Rahim (Fauda actor Amir Boutrous, who also played President Nasser in The Crown), ignores all the others and singles out the Indian girl. With nobody to turn to for help, the akelli woman must fend for herself and shake her tormentors off her back.
Akelli is co-written (with Gunjan Saxena and Ayush Tiwari) and directed by debutant Pranay Meshram. There isn't much in the screenplay that would suggest that the project has emanated from either exceptional research or exemplary intuition.
The film is hobbled by cliches not only of the escape thriller that it is but also of the geopolitical drama that it aspires to be. It rises to no great heights no matter which of the two generic labels you choose to put on AkellI.
As for its technical attributes, Akelli, filmed principally in Uzbekistan, is pretty solid, with director of photography Pushkar Singh making a fair fist of crafting frames and creating angles that enhance the efficacy of the tense moments, however rare. Unfortunately, the story lurches about in search of rhythm and only sporadically gets a grip on the essence of the struggle of a woman on the run.
What lets Akelli down is its inability to fully utilise the conventions of a tale of survival in exceedingly hostile terrain and infuse the narrative with a genuine sense of the damage that war wreaks on humanity. The film plays instead like a straightforward tale of an innocent caught in a battle that she has strayed into for no fault of her own.
As the damsel pursued by terrorists, Nushrratt Bharuccha swings between scaredy-cat vulnerability and dour-faced fortitude without quite succeeding in raising her game to a level that could have turned a generally competent performance into a truly memorable one.
She has two actors from the Israeli Netflix series Fauda, both cast as marauding antagonists, and Nishant Dahiya (as an Indian Muslim factory manager who takes a shine to Jyoti) for support, but the film's vapid core and predictable flow obviate the possibility of it ever springing to life and picking up momentum.
The script gives the three above-mentioned male actors little opportunity to carve a space for themselves in a single-note story that is too wrapped up in its desperate-damsel-in-the-desert scenario to notice the huge gaps in the script. Neither the bad guys nor the do-gooders are etched out well.
The dog whistles are all in here. As the factory women are brought into the ISIS hideout, the vicious commander of the terrorists declares that he feels he is in jannat (paradise), the obvious reference being to the hoorain (beautiful girls/angels) that are believed to be ordained for jihadists who lay down their lives in the defence of their religion.
That is not all. When Jyoti falls into the clutches of the debauched Assad (Tsahi Halevi, the second Fauda actor in the cast), he promptly announces that she will be his fourth begum. The plight of the women captured by ISIS and forced to be sex slaves is also underlined. Jyoti finds two teenaged girls who are held against their will in the evil man's mansion. She makes common cause with duo and stands up for them.
Wahab and Assad are maniacal, merciless monsters - both hateful caricatures that are more risible than fearsome - who stop at nothing to impose themselves on the meek. But, to be fair, Akelli isn't as screechy and strident as Bollywood films of this genre tend to be.
The ominous ISIS black flags are all around, but the victims, barring the female protagonist (who is the only one with a Hindu name in the garments factory), are all Muslims. Akelli does not harp so much on the religious identity that makes Jyoti a sitting duck in Mosul as on the tussle for control of land between ISIS and the Iraqi forces. It is another matter that the two inimical formations do not actually square off against each other during the course of the two-hour film.
Akelli focusses squarely on the story of Jyoti Arora and how the girl from a small north Indian town ends up in Mosul. Sacked from her job as a member of the ground staff at an airport after an altercation with a badly-behaved passenger, Jyoti is compelled to accept the position of a factory supervisor in a war zone.
On landing in Mosul, she witnesses an unwilling suicide bomber, a petrified pre-teen girl, blow herself up in the middle of a road. That is only the first of several explosions that occur in Akelli. Jyoti struggles to surmount the trauma of the opening encounter with a bit of help from her manager, Rafeeq (Nishant Dahiya), but even bigger trouble erupts even before she can settle into her job.
Chases across the dusty landscape, a few gunfights, a protracted cat and mouse game inside an airport terminal and a final dash across a tarmac engulfed in darkness are the action set pieces that Akelli assembles in a rather mechanical, if not entirely dreary, way. Much as it tries to steady itself, the film fumbles and falters.
This tale of a woman cornered and fighting for dear life had the potential to be a thrilling, edge-of-the-seat ripsnorter. It falls way, way short. The lacklustre Akelli is a film best left alone.