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| Photo: Kartik Aryan Instagram |
Because of the subject matter, Ram Madhvani is an intriguing option to helm Dhamaka, the Hindi version of the 2013 Korean thriller The Terror Live. It allows Madhavani to further tighten the gap between reality and orchestration, the grey region that has become recognised as his hallmark style of filmmaking, as a statement on primetime broadcast media's apathy.
While Madhvani refuses to term his method 'organic,' he does enable an environment on set free of 'action' and 'cut,' allowing the actors to fully immerse themselves in the feeling their characters are experiencing. They are given carte blanche to create the performance, the tale, and the setting.
That is how television news should be – and isn't. Scripts are provided, the appearance is created, the tone is defined, and the expressions are created. Of course, there's improv, but even those lines are fed into the teleprompter, which is positioned diagonally in front of the news anchor. "Going live in..." is used as a prompt to 'perform,' and continual directions are yelled at the anchor through an earpiece that simulates a voice coming from one's brain.
Madhvani's working method is diametrically opposed to the subject matter of his picture. Either an explosion or a fizzle should have resulted from the chemical reaction. But it's somewhere in the middle, leaning toward explosion, but not because that's what it wants to be.
Dhamaka isn't written in capital letters, and there's no exclamation point at the end. But, like in his last two films, the Sonam Kapoor-starrer hostage thriller Neerja (2016) and the Sushmita Sen-starrer Disney+ Hotstar programme Aarya (2020), Madhavni excels at building suspense and maintaining it with fast bursts of follow-ups.
When he receives an anonymous phone call that leads to an explosion on the nearby Bandra-Worli Sea Link in Mumbai, he has the opportunity to go down the corporate ladder. Rather of reporting the strange call to the police, he scribbles 'Exclusive' in all capitals and double-underlines it. In lieu of the bombshell breaking news, he phones his former employer Ankita (Amruta Subhash), who pledges to bring him his primetime show back. The caller, on the other hand, is a step ahead of Pathak as he continues to threaten him into going against the channel, bringing him closer to the conscience he had long abandoned for commercial gain.
Dhamaka, on the other hand, is plainly a one-man show. All of the other figures are cardboard replicas of the characters they depict. As the news producer concerned with TRPs, Amruta Subhash is charmingly merciless; ridiculous statements fly out of her lips like casual verbal hand grenades. Mrunal Thakur is the film's moral centre, but we view her through the prism of the protagonist, so there isn't much to gnaw on.
Despite their presence looming huge over the whole storey, the ministers and TV news viewers have no faces. Here, a lack of personification is employed as a tactic. "Mantri ji aa rahe hain," is a repeated comment that is disguised as consistency.
Conclusion
Yes, Dhamaka is rushed, emotional, and loud, and it ends up like the monster it is attempting to extinguish. But, hey, it's a movie, so it's meant to be all of that. On the other hand, news isn't.
Dhamaka is available to watch on Netflix India.