Crazxy Review: Sohum Shah Pulls It Off With Aplomb

A taut and tense thriller, Crazxy, produced by and starring Sohum Shah, whose choices as an actor have never been conventional, upends genre norms to deliver a 93-minute adrenaline rush that until it ends up in a small puddle of avoidable mush is absolutely riveting fare. Coming to think of it, even the somewhat mawkish conclusion is not wholly out of place in a drama that blends the emotional with the visceral.

Crazxy wastes nary a scene in its sustained bid to generate intrigue and suspense centred on the conversations and choices of the protagonist, a successful surgeon with a volatile past making his way through a day on which everything that can go wrong goes horribly wrong.

The film rests on a virtuoso solo act that sees Sohum Shah in the guise of a Delhi doctor pulled into a heart-pounding race against time to save his kidnapped daughter, a girl he heartlessly abandoned due to no fault of hers.

The directorial debut of screenwriter Girish Kohli (Mom, Kesari), Crazxy has Shah and a Range Rover in virtually every single frame. The character is always in the driver's seat but he is never in control of the ride up ahead. Like him, the audience is kept guessing although not every reveal that the film springs upon us is a surprise.

All the conversations that the protagonist, Dr Abhimanyu Sood, has are with disembodied voices emanating from his phone. With each call that he receives and with every exchange that he has, it becomes clear that the medicine man could himself do with some healing.

Crazxy uses the voices of Nimisha Sajayan as Abhimanyu's ex-wife, Shilpa Shukla as his lover, Tinnu Anand as the kidnapper and Piyush Mishra as his boss - none of them appears on screen except in the form of images on the protagonist's phone - to help the audience understand how the doctor's mind works.

The gripping thrill-a-minute affair is also an intense character study focused on a once-respected professional who has come a cropper in every test that he has faced as a family man.

A terrible father, a failed husband and a flawed lover whose reputation as a surgeon, too, is now under a dark cloud following a death due to medical negligence, Abhimanyu has decided to pay his way out of legal trouble.

That is the point at which Crazxy begins. Abhimanyu places a duffle bag containing 50 million rupees in the boot of his off-roader and drives out of a parking lot even as a stern, coarse voice on his phone orders him to hasten matters.

The first thing that Abhimanyu encounters as he hits the road is an errant motorcycle rider, who crosses his path only to instantly face the consequences of the reckless act. It is made clear at the very outset that this doctor is under a great deal of stress and isn't an easy man to deal with.

Crazxy tells the story of a tumultuous day in the life of a conflicted individual, using methods that are anything but routine. Abhimanyu receives a call from a mysterious man demanding ransom for his kidnapped daughter, Vedica, a girl with Down Syndrome deprived of her father's love.

He has only one hour until sunset to buy the teenage girl's freedom although he has no idea where she is held captive. It is April Fools' Day and Abhimanyu initially wonders if he is being pranked. At one point, he asks the kidnapper, a voice he is sure he has heard before but cannot quite place, which radio station he is calling from. The man at the other end of the line is in no mood to relent.

As Abhimanyu keeps driving, other voices pop up on his phone, those of his ex-wife, his current lover and his boss. Tension mounts. He is faced with a difficult choice: with the money he has, he can either save his own skin or rescue his daughter from the clutches of the kidnapper.

His estranged wife makes hapless pleas for help. His lover makes things more difficult for him than they already are. As the situation begins to slip out of his control, will he or will he not put his daughter before his own self and do what a good father must in a crisis? That is what Crazxy is going to reveal in the next hour and a bit but without resorting to any extraneous narrative means.

The film, well into its second half, stages a protracted and disquieting sequence in which the doctor, forced to multitask, changes a flat type in the middle of nowhere while he is on a video call guiding a junior performing a critical surgery and, on the phone, advising the alarmed kidnapper on ways to sedate Vedica.

It is a wafer-thin plot about a man presented with an opportunity to redeem himself in a life-and-death situation. As he drives into the wilderness, he is left to fend for himself and confront the repercussions of the choices that he has made in life. Questions swirl around him and there are no easy answers.

Crazxy is another feather in Sohum Shah's cap. To deliver a performance that holds the audience's attention for 90 minutes in a film that shuns gimmicky diversions could not have been easy. He pulls it off with aplomb.

The role demands great physicality - the character not only breaks a sweat on more than one occasion but also breaks a bone - but its emotional core is just as crucial. Shah strikes a remarkable balance.

First-time director Girish Kohli demonstrates commendable grasp on the medium in a film that freely experiments with the technical tools at its disposal. Directors of photography Sunil Ramkrishna Borkar and Kuldeep Mamania impart to the film all the visual energy that the ride demands.

Also notable is the manner in which the voice performances are integrated into the design of a film enhanced by Jesper Kyd's background score and the use of retro songs - Laxmikant Pyarelal's Abhimanyu chakravyuh mein phans gaya hai tu (from Inquilab, with Kishore Kumar's vocals kept intact) and Vishal Bhardwaj's Goli maar bheje mein (a rejigged version of the Satya song).

Crazxy isn't an average crowd-pleaser. It dares to be different and sticks to its guns. That is where the appeal of the film lies.