Adeel (Ahmed Ali Akbar) wants to get away from it all. Living in a rickety home, with an alcoholic, fragile, shaken-up father, Adeel drives for an online ride-sharing service. Small talking with less-than-ideal customers for five-star ratings, he gets starry-eyed when a young boy mentions that their family lives in Dubai. Like many of those hard up, Adeel fantasises about Dubai but doesn’t utter a peep about his long-term goals. Perhaps he is afraid that saying something out loud would jinx his future.

Like Adeel, I will not utter a peep about the story or the characters. I don’t want to ruin your experience. The Dubai reference pops up late in the film when you least expect it, propelling Adeel into a world of hurt. A torn newspaper clip of Jumeirah Beach pushes him back into the fray. Desperate to get away from Pakistan, he has offered to help track a hitman with a red hat — the ‘Laal Kabootar’ of the film — for 300,000 rupees and, by the time he looks at the newspaper clip, he’s already neck deep in murder and intrigue.

Adeel is but one moving part of a flawless, seamless thriller from neophyte filmmakers Kamal Khan, Ali Abbas Naqvi, and producers Hania and Kamil Chima. Khan, the director of the film, and Naqvi, the screenwriter, knit a frantically paced, edge-of-the-seat thriller that comes at you from all directions at the same time. There is a lot to process in this time-constricted tale of death, drama and uncontrollable urges.

Laal Kabootar is a frantically paced, edge-of-the-seat thriller that comes at you from all directions at the same time — and a masterpiece of new-age cinema by new-blood filmmakers

Take, for example, Adeel’s two-room, low-class brick-and-mortar house that was once excessively painted with a heavy hand, and whose colour is chipping away. Cheap posters of Raveena Tandon and Rani Mukherjee in their youth are taped on walls; next to the two is wrestler Kurt Angle. A mix of the glamour, sultriness and machoism that may have silently, subconsciously, influenced Adeel to become a hero-ish, man-of-action in the film.

Four manual sewing machines are uncaringly piled up in one corner. A dozen greasy, dirty dishes are stacked by the kitchen sink. These tell-tale signs signify that a woman once lived in this house, and that the men, too wrapped up in their angst and despair, are incapable of cleaning up after themselves.

Aliya (Mansha Pasha), one of the two women we see in the film, functions differently than Adeel. A young widow of a carefree, cheery, deadline-pushing journalist (Ali Kazmi in an effective cameo; a living, breathing McGuffin, if there ever was one), Aliya is in search of the man with the red hat who killed her husband. The police, headed by an inspector named Ibrahim (Rashid Farooqui), aren’t that concerned with a ride-by shooting. “We can’t chase every man with a red hat,” they argue.

Ibrahim, a corrupt cop who loves his daughter to pieces, and whose wife (the second female in the film) longs for him to come home at night, is preoccupied with bullying a real estate magnate (Mohammad Ahmed) into forking over some dough. The three stories run parallel to each other, intersecting out of the blue like a jump-scare from a horror film, and then backsliding into their own narrative tracks.

One feels, by the very end when the film comes to its conclusion with a much-needed pre-credits closure, that everyone deserved what was coming for them. Laal Kabootar is a masterpiece of new-age cinema, made by new-blood filmmakers.

Khan, and his uber-talented right hand, cinematographer Mo Azmi (O21, Cake) tenaciously design frames with an eye for personal artistic exploitation, while indulging in every cinematographic technique they can think of within reason and the context of scenes.

In one particular scene, when Aliya and Adeel have a difference of opinion, we see them — and their perspectives — separated by a rusty metal grill. A continuous shoulder-mounted long take of a confrontation seamlessly starts to jump-cut at the right split second. An intense, single-take, gun barrage at a house, where the reveal — a blood stained t-shirt — only becomes apparent when the director and the cinematographer want them to.

Small, astute moments litter this film like the graffiti, dirt and grunge of the streets in lower-class areas of Karachi. The colour grade is a little too thick with its rust and blue palette for my taste, but suits the tone of the film just fine. Ditto for Taha Malik’s songs, and Daniyal Hyatt’s score.

Naqvi’s screenplay, and the hack-slash edit of scenes are apparent in the first 10 minutes of the film, as the story hastily tries to get itself on track. Adeel, Aliya, Ibrahim, the man in the red hat Mama (all brilliantly portrayed by the cast) — every character has a staunch, idiosyncratic sense of conviction that drives them.

One feels, by the very end when the film comes to its conclusion with a much-needed pre-credits closure, that everyone deserved what was coming for them.

Laal Kabootar is a masterpiece of new-age cinema, made by new-blood filmmakers. A thriller for the thinking man and the ones who don’t have brain cells to spare.

Published in Dawn, ICON, March 31st, 2019