In Gumm — In the Middle of Nowhere, which probably is the most fitting title ever for a motion picture, Shamoon Abbasi plays Haider the Daggar: a man who has the worst sense of direction in the world, and undoubtedly, the biggest bladder as well.

In a scene set in a jungle in the middle of nowhere, he stops to relieve himself and expels at least three liters in an uncut shot. Although shocking, and utterly unwarranted, this scene visually represents something you already knew: this is a piss-poor movie.

Haider the Daggar is a gangster who prides himself in his knife-wielding skills. He claims that he can move faster than a speeding bullet, and later kills two cops who were somehow lost in the jungle with him.

The frugally made Gumm is a bad rip-off of Wrecked, moving to and fro between flashbacks that add further confusion to chaos

For the bulk of his screen time (which is, around 30 percent of the movie), Haider makes his way through the jungle, passing the same big rock again and again, as if he’s going round in circles. At times you pity the guy; not only for his handicapped pathfinding ability but for his decisions in general.

In his first scene, he walks up to Asad (Sami Khan, the hero of the film), wearing a hoodie. When Asad — who has amnesia, a broken leg and a bag full of money — asks Haider who he is, the latter looks at him for a moment and then lies, claiming the money bag so that he can get treatment for his daughter.

As we eventually find out when Asad’s amnesia gradually recedes, the daughter was Asad’s and not Haider’s. There’s even a pumped-up song Meri beti, meri rani in the movie to prove it. So why did Haider lie? And why are they in a small patch of the woods, supposedly lost, and what is the story? Writers, directors, cinematographers, editors Ammar Lasani and Kanza Zia may not know answers to these questions themselves.

This frugally made movie is a bad rip-off of the Adrian Brody starrer Wrecked (2010) and, like that film, moves to and fro between flashbacks that fill us in on the backstory.

Asad and his cronies (who all but disappear from the movie) were local hoods who had day jobs as Repo-men. In the middle of harassing an old man for his lack of repayments, Asad sees the man’s college-going daughter (Shameen Khan) and is immediately smitten. Driven by pedophilia and lust (she looks half his age in some shots), he disowns his bad-boy image after being told off (his pickup line is: mazay kareingay [we’ll have fun]).

But the girl likes this bad boy and soon they marry and have a child, who has acute terminal leukemia that can be cured with a single operation, all because the script says so. Asad, desperate and without funds, goes to Haider to loan him a gun and a getaway driver (who drives within city speed limits) and robs a branch of Axis Bank — which, incidentally, is an actual bank franchise in India. An accident later, the getaway car is totaled, Asad’s leg is broken and he has no recollection of his past.

Because Lasani and Zia didn’t have much of a story or sense of intrigue, we learn that the woods are haunted by the wandering spirit of a dead girl and our two characters are tracked by a pack of wolves who howl like ghouls.

The wolves never fully appear in shots; the bodies of their victims are, presumably, pulled off camera by the production staff. When one lone wolf finally makes his entrance at the climax of the movie, it looks like an emaciated fox (maybe it was, who knows!).

Lasani and Zia shoot with a very wide lens, swivelling their steadicam round and round like a merry-go-round to establish the characters’ isolation. But they — and both Asad and Haider — forget one thing: if the car did plummet down the road, it couldn’t have been far from the motorway. So why didn’t the characters just go in the opposite direction of the crashed car?

Forget logic, the technical craft is just as bad with day shots colour-graded for night, unrecoverable patches of highlights the camera sensor couldn’t read phasing in and out between the branches (to the audience, it looks like pixelated patches of sky). Even the raindrops fall at different angles when both characters are standing right next to each other.

Lasani and Zia, film graduates of the New York Film Academy, don’t really have agrasp of the basics. In one shot Asad and Haider are seen standing opposite each other but their eyeline (the line of sight and the head angle) don’t match the cut. One is looking at the sky and the other somewhere near the ground. I’ve seen better thesis films from amateur students than Gumm.

What am I saying? Gumm is more fun this way, especially if you want to laugh out loud.

Published in Dawn, ICON, January 20th, 2019