UGLY: Ugly in a beautiful way

UGLY

*ing: Rahul Bhat, Ronit Roy, Girish Kulkarni, Siddhanth Kapoor, Tejaswini Kolhapure

Rated: 6/10

Where there is Anurag Kashyap, there is darkness, greyness, extremities of human character and negativity in all their unimagined but intrinsic hues. Ugly goes hook, line and sinker into this uncomfortable but compelling zone of human ill-will, greed and unrelenting ugliness and draws you in too, this time in the garb of a police procedural around a little girl’s disappearance.

You may call it ill-timed for festival season, but that’s Kashyap for you — totally and brazenly in-your-face with a mirror that you may not want to peep into even at the worst of times. His choice of characters to show you the ugly side of societal existence is apt — no one could have played the role of a sadistic, revengeful and edgy cop as beautifully as Ronit Roy does. He taps his alcoholic wife’s phone and keeps her caged in a scary marriage from where there is no escape, other than suicide. He goes after her former husband with a relentlessness that could have been powered only by seething revenge and his poker faced pursuit of all things close to his burning hatred keeps this film consistently on the boil.

Then there is Rahul Bhat who shows up greyness in such you-and-me ways that you feel almost guilty of secretly sharing his shades. As an aspiring actor much into extra-marital dalliances, alcohol, wife beating, hypocrisy, abject failure and yet some genuine feelings around his daughter, he towers with his frustrations and complexities.Not that other actors like Tejiswini, the chronic depressive, her friend living her own hell of deception, adultery and husband impotence, Bhat’s pal Vineeth Kumar as the ultimate opportunist and Tejiswini’s brother, the unscrupulous conster Siddhanth Kapoor, do any less.

Kashyap’s characters are all well-fleshed out and very distinctly essential to his plot. And in them stars Marathi actor Girish Kulkarni as the cop who sets up the showstopper scene signifying the things to come.Kashyap’s darkness is not just limited to his characters and stories. It extends to the ambience too, adding to the negativity. Most of Ugly is shot at night-time or in dingy spaces with overhead yellow light pulling your heart even further down.

Amid all this crippling force of human inhumanness and an existential mess that Kashyap weaves, there is also the case of the missing girl. Somehow, his innate compulsion to explore the nether side of human existence deluges the basic premise of the story — that a cherubic girl has gone missing and she should be found. One wishes there was something more done in that direction. Other than that, this is Kashyap on a compelling thriller drive.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 28 December, 2014