Retrograde amnesia is a good, if oft used, place to start a mystery thriller. That’s where Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s OTT film, Kadak Singh, opens. Pankaj Tripathi’s AK Srivastava, a financial crime investigator working to expose a Ponzi scheme, is laid up in the hospital after he purportedly attempted suicide and he has lost parts of his memory, especially of the events leading up to the suicide.
Roy Chowdhury uses the Rashomon effect to stitch together the story of what happened from the point of view of four central characters Srivastava doesn’t remember — his daughter Sakshi (Sanjana Sanghi), his lover Naina (Jaya Ahsan), his boss Tyagi (Dilip Shankar) and his junior Arjun (Paresh Pahuja).
Each of them recounts their version of what happened leading up to the suicide attempt, allowing Srivastava to solve the mystery sitting in his hospital room, with head nurse Mrs Kannan (Parvathy Thiruvothu) acting as his sounding board.
Each story also brings out a different facet of the man Srivastava used to be — a man of strict principles and integrity as an investigator in the Department of Financial Crimes, a taciturn and absentee father who is curt and abrupt with his daughter and son, a man with deep sadness who is looking for companionship — and juxtaposes it with the jolly, quirky, affable Srivastava he is in the hospital. Each version makes the audience wonder if there is more to the man on the hospital bed than he is letting on.
The story — written by Viraf Sarkari, Ritesh Shah and Roy Chowdhury — moves back and forth between past and present and while that keeps the audience engaged, it also affects the pacing of the film, which seems to rush through certain scenes while dragging excruciatingly in others.
The film is quite capable of organically keeping the audience guessing but sometimes uses red herrings to deliberately mislead the audience. And it feels like the film can’t quite decide what message it wants to convey as it touches upon, but barely dwells on, mental health, proper parenting or white collar crime and its impact on society.
What Kadak Singh has to its advantage, however, is a solid cast that rallies. Tripathi shows once again why he is such a sought-after actor as he seamlessly switches from one version of Srivastava to another. Sanghi does well as the daughter who is dealing with the loss of a parent, despite not having lost him, and struggles to reconcile the version of her father — who she and her brother call Kadak Singh because of his strict unyielding ways — with the man he is revealed to be in other spheres. Ahsan brings a wealth of emotional depth in her role as “the other woman”. In fact, some of the most honest and heartfelt scenes are the ones that play out between Tripathi and Sanghi, and Tripathi and Ahsan.
Parvathy’s presence is a bit confusing. Why does the head nurse sit in a cubicle in Srivastava’s room? She is deliberately mysterious about all the things being talked about in the room that she is privy to. One constantly wonders if there is more to her than we get to see and maybe will have a bigger role to play, but it never happens. But Kannan’s interactions with Srivastava are also some of the very few moments of levity allowed in the film and it is refreshing.
The second half of Kadak Singh, which is when most of the different storylines come together, feels especially rushed, as if the filmmaker was aware that he had taken up too much time setting up the premise, and the solution comes as a bit of a letdown with how simply it is all cleared up.
Kadak Singh might not be as kadak as the central character but it is an engaging one-time watch with an interesting premise, and a treat for fans of Pankaj Tripathi. And Shantanu Moitra’s lovely soundtrack definitely adds to the emotional heft of the film.