A morality tale with no moral compass of its own, Daayra continues director Meghna Gulzar’s creative spiral after Raazi (2018). That deeply humanist espionage drama is nearly a decade old, but instead of developing her style over time, Gulzar’s technical and thematic know-how appears to have disintegrated with each of the three features that she has directed since then. Like her breakout movie Talvar (2015), Daayra creates the illusion of moral ambiguity, but the film is built on a premise so fundamentally flawed that it’s never able to recover.
In Talvar — a Rashomon-style mystery about the infamous 2008 Noida double-murder case — Gulzar made her allegiances quite apparent after spending two hours playing it cool. In Daayra, on the other hand, the filmmaker stops short of condemning something that shouldn’t be up for debate in the first place.
Daayra presents an ideological conflict between a police officer who believes in letting the law take its course (Kareena Kapoor Khan) and another who has no qualms in playing judge, jury, and executioner (Prithviraj Sukumaran). As the saying goes, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (Who guards the guards)?”
A tried and tested premise
Daayra begins with an act of violence committed against a woman. It’s about time we moved on from this exploitative premise. A young woman, running an errand for her teenage brother, is kidnapped by a gang of drunk truck drivers, brutally assaulted, and set on fire on the side of a highway. Meanwhile, her mother and brother are made to run from pillar to post by a cop who refuses to register an FIR because he’s convinced the young woman has run away with her boyfriend.
The discovery of her brutalised body sends shockwaves across the country — though Daayra never identifies where the film is set. If anything, the movie goes to great lengths to remain vague on details.
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Swift action is taken by DCP Raman Kumar, played by Prithviraj and four suspects are rounded up within a matter of hours. There is no doubt that they are the culprits. Before they can be tried, however, the DCP and his team execute the suspects — one of whom is a minor — in cold blood.
As per protocol, an internal investigation is arranged, with DCP Ajooni Kohli (Kareena Kapoor Khan) at the helm. Ordinarily in a film like this, Ajooni would be the protagonist, but Daayra makes the strange choice to present the two cops’ duelling worldviews as equally rational.
Making a case for vigilante justice?
In the film’s most misguided sequence, Gulzar juxtaposes the young woman’s brutal assault — it’s extremely graphic, quite unnecessarily so — with DCP Raman carrying out the “encounters”. The goal is rather straightforward: Gulzar is playing to the audience’s most primal instincts. She knows that subconsciously, viewers will forgive an act of vengeance when they are shown a terrible crime. But Daayra isn’t a superhero movie where vigilante justice is permitted. It’s a grounded drama about right and wrong.
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The movie works on precisely one occasion. After a jarring opening few minutes during which both stars are given “entry shots” straight out of director Rohit Shetty’s “copaganda” movies, Gulzar dials things back and zeroes in on DCP Raman’s investigation. It becomes clear why Prithviraj was cast in the role: he hails from Kerala’s Malayalam-language film industry, which has pretty much perfected the police procedural genre. This 30-minute stretch is engrossing, taut and effortlessly successful at portraying DCP Raman as a person who’s doing his job instead of a mouthpiece for vigilante justice.
The same cannot, unfortunately, be said about the scenes featuring Kapoor Khan. Her performance isn’t the problem; it’s just that she is miscast as DCP Ajooni. She plays the character as a flawless know-it-all, but wouldn’t it have been more interesting if her performance suggested that Ajooni is showing signs of uncertainty, second-guessing her conviction in a system that she knows to be imperfect?