‘Ulajh’ movie review: Janhvi Kapoor is caught in an inept thriller

Janhvi Kapoor in a still from ‘Ulajh’
| Photo Credit: YouTube/Junglee Pictures

What sort of a spy movie is Sudhanshu Saria’s Ulajh? It begins as a Raazi (2018) in pantsuits: patriotic female protagonist, driven by loyalty and legacy, enlists to serve her country on foreign turf. Indo-Pak diplomatic relations, as fraught and fragile as they were in 1971, inform the narrative stakes. Both films hail from Junglee Pictures, and the editor, in each case, is Nitin Baid. If that weren’t enough, the new film even has a song with ‘watan’ in its title — plastered, ineffectually, over the opening credits and thereby fast forgotten.

It was only much later, in the closing moments of its 134-minute runtime, that Ulajh revealed its true hand. Without divulging too much, one can say that its swerve — from tense thriller to overambitious franchise-spinner — was a step in the wrong direction. It’s a particularly gruesome example of the ongoing Marvelization of Bollywood: films too distracted to stay put, floating future possibilities without successfully completing the job at hand.

Suhana Bhatia (Janhvi Kapoor) is a young Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer, hailing from a lineage of patriots. As the film begins, we meet her on a diplomatic detail in Kathmandu; talking over the phone, she emphasizes “strategy” and “leverage,” but is instead reminded by her higher-up to simply “observe.” Suhana has a justifiable chip on her shoulder — because of her background, yes, but also because of her gender — which becomes all the more pronounced when she’s appointed Deputy High Commissioner to the UK, the youngest appointee to land the posting.

In London, Suhana negotiates trade deals and ignores the sexist sniggering of her colleagues. She also meets and has a fling with a guy named Nakul, introduced to her as a Michelin-starred chef (Gulshan Devaiah can sell the world on anything). Before we know it, Nakul is blackmailing her with their sex tape, demanding confidential intel. Their meetings after this point are draped in a genuine creepiness — the excellent Shreya Dev Dube wields the camera — but also raked towards the comic. “These nations, borders… they are just lines in the sand,” Nakul tells her, sounding like a stoned professor.

From the beginning, Ulajh speaks a modern, multicultural tongue. Suhana is adept in Nepali, Urdu, French, and Japanese. She can sniff out backgrounds from precise dialects and inflections. Her colleagues at the embassy represent a healthy cross-section of India — Roshan Mathew, so wonderfully harangued in the streaming series Poacher, gets a hilarious outburst in Malayalam as embedded R&AW officer Sebin. But the other characters are ill-served. Meiyang Chang prowls around in a thankless role, and when Nakul, claiming to be an ISI agent, gives his name as “Mohammad Humayun Akhtar,” it’s so obviously overwrought and anachronistic you just know it’s fake.

Janhvi Kapoor is a second-generation actor playing a third-generation diplomat. The film leans into this rather cheaply, mentioning ‘nepotism’ early on. Kapoor is surrounded by a formidable secondary cast: Adil Hussain, Rajesh Tailang, Jitendra Joshi, Rajendra Gupta, Alyy Khan. Ulajh — co-written by Saria and Parveez Shaikh, with Atika Chouhan on dialogues — makes a point by depicting the world of high-end diplomacy as still oppressively male. Suhana is a fast-breathing, muscle-twitching role, and Kapoor conveys her mounting disorientation and self-doubt well. Yet the film doesn’t seem to trust its star, cutting in with an expository background score at crucial junctures, sullying the silences so paramount to thrillers.

The implausibilities pile up: high-ranking officials zipping in and out of countries, without notice; a conspiracy of comically absurd proportions; a confrontation between Suhana and Sebin with the front door left ajar. The convoluted second-half collapses in on itself. It’s as though the makers suddenly ran out of budget — or worse, ideas — and settled for a sub-par climax in the din of Delhi. On that note, is the Research and Analysis Wing headquartered at the Statesman House building in Connaught Place? Should be fun to find out.

Ulajh is currently running in theatres