#Alive

In a different movie, the picture of a young man in an overlong t-shirt and red slacks, hanging from his apartment’s railing while holding a selfie-stick, out of reach of zombies from the apartment below, would have struck a whimsical, lighthearted vibe. The image’s subtext would have been a celebration of the rebellious, adolescent mentality of the younger generation, who are inveigled by tech and social media, yet remain aloof of immediate dangers and maturity.

In #Alive’s poster, this emblematic iconography of youth becomes a missed opportunity. The deeper notions take backseat to a more straightforward idea: what if you were left home alone when the zombie pandemic hits?

The youngster suspended in the air is Oh Joon-woo (Ah-In Yoo, Burning), a late-teen/early 20s gamer, whose family — a father, mother and sister — is out doing something or the other. Minutes into the movie Joon-woo’s friends, speaking to him from their homes via audio-chat, interrupt his online video-game with baffled exasperations of a zombie outbreak.

Joon-woo turns to his television — other than his phone, his only other companion for the next 20 or so days — as news reports flash incidents of the outbreak. Peeking out at his apartment complex, he sees quick-witted zombies overrunning the place. Scared out of his wits, he barricades himself in his semi-posh dwelling by shoving a big fridge in front of the front door.

Hot on the heels of Peninsula (the sequel to Train to Busan), debuting director Il Cho’s movie is a sleek, minimal, survival thriller of a semi-doofus youngster, whose entire existence is dependent on tech, and for whom things turn hopeless when he’s slurped his last pack of instant noodles.

Like his last meal, everything eventually runs out. Soon his internet stops working, the electricity gets cut, water runs out, and television networks shutdown broadcasts. Rather than doing something about his predicament, Joon-woo, in retaliation, turns into an angry drunk by ransacking his father’s expensive alcohol collection.

Passively waiting in his home for a miraculous cure, Joon-woo’s situation is the first thematically accurate representation of the scare Covid-19 spread to the uninfected. Holed up in his apartment, with only technology and television keeping him company, there is a lot of truth eerily looking back at the viewer from their television screens when watching the movie.

Joon-woo, like most humans, is easily scared. In an earlier scene, he sees a young man fall to his death while trying to catch a signal from his apartment’s railing. The shock makes him slam his laptop’s lid shut. It isn’t until things get really desperate that Joon-woo tries the same stunt himself (ergo: the poster image).

Despite his few random acts of pluck, Joon-woo is not a man of action, nor is he a hero — and that is what makes the screenplay by Cho and Matt Naylor uniquely entertaining (Naylor is also credited with Alone, another zombie thriller of lower production values, set to release in October, that looks like a carbon copy of #Alive).

Cho, enamoured by the Hollywood way of handling the story, keeps #Alive fast and relatable — and like most Hollywood films, his protagonist is a one-dimensional peg in the story. As a person, Joon-woo is a nonentity, who sees little, if any growth or maturity during his home-alone tenure.

As written earlier, the movie could have dug deeper into a young man’s way of thinking, and a wittier take on the story (ala Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland and even Warm Bodies) may have gelled better with its overall setting.

To make amends (or to add some gender equality), #Alive gets a much-needed heroine by the middle of the film. Kim Yoo-bin (Shin-Hye Park, Miracle in Cell No. 7) is a young woman with a good head on her shoulders, who lives in the apartment block opposite Joon-woo’s.

However, from her introduction, the situations in the screenplay start screwing themselves up. Foolhardy plot points and a clichéd deus ex machina moments leading to the final throes of the movie ruin most of the tension and ingenuity of the premise.

When the helicopter dramatically rises from below his rooftop at the climax (how could it? the apartment complex wasn’t that tall, and the rescue chopper should be high in the sky), you know the film chose to take the easy way out. By then, one’s first impression of #engrossing would’ve been replaced by an impassive #meh.

Streaming now on Netflix, #Alive is appropriately rated 16+. There are scenes of solitude and, of course, of zombies eating people

Director Il Cho’s zombie attack thriller #Alive has a premise full of potential for social commentary but chooses to take the easy way out. Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare is about two women battling patriarchy, pining for sexual liberation while making all the wrong decisions

Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare

Balaji Telefilms, producers and distributors of raunchy sex comedies, insipid action movies and (very rarely) heart-wrenching emotional dramas, may have done a double back-flip out of joy after reading writer-director Alankrita Shrivastava’s screenplay of Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare [Dolly Kitty And Those Twinkling Stars].

Hypothetically speaking, what’s not to get excited about? The plot of two women from rural Bihar living in Greater Noida, battling patriarchy, pining for sexual liberation while making all the wrong decisions, ticks all the boxes of being a heavyweight award season, or international film festival, contender.

The thing is, “hypothetically speaking”, and ticking the right boxes, does not a great movie make. Actually, forget great — even a slightly above-average movie would have been a better experience.

Dolly (Konkona Sen Sharma) and Kajal (Bhumi Pednekar, at times quite good) are cousins who may or may not be that close (it’s hard to see if they really like each other). In the beginning, at a local fair, Kajal — her rural accent protruding in every word she utters — tells Dolly that Dolly’s thickly bearded husband Amit (the beard is all one remembers of the character) is broadly hinting about having sex with her (Kajal). With a shockingly fake laugh — and heaps of over-performance — Dolly dismisses the idea.

We later learn that Dolly, despite bearing two children, is frigid in bed; Amit, ergo, is always on the lookout for ways to satiate his immediate sexual urges. Half way into the film, he begins using a dating app called ‘Red Rose Romance’, a thinly disguised sex-call service where uninterested women perform the girlfriend experience for pent-up men. What Amit doesn’t know is that Kitty, the girl he is speaking to, is Kajal’s alias.

Kajal cries at her predicament, but resolves to be an independent young woman. There is simply no way that she’s going back to her parents, who wish to marry her off. Her other primary interest is losing her virginity to the right man, who happens to be a somewhat sincere-sounding client named Pradeep (Vikrant Massey).

Dolly, meanwhile, starts hitting it off with a young virgin, delivery guy, to whom, for some bizarre, warped-up reason, she never gives five stars to — even after he helps her with chores.

There’s also another problem at home: Dolly’s younger son, maybe 10 years of age, is showing signs of gender confusion; he loves to dress up in frocks and play with dolls.

While there are ample, contextually heavy, emotional angles in the story (insecurity, diffidence, self-satisfaction), the blatantly aggressive fixation with sex, or sexual situations, impairs what could have been a simple and powerful story of empowerment of two different women seeking that elusive “five star” life. In its stead we get a heavy-handed, starkly opinionated mess of a movie whose climax, set in an amusement park full of family and children, sees a feminist artist unveiling a giant statue of female genitalia.

Streaming now on Netflix, Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare is obviously — deliberately — made for audiences of 18+

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 4th, 2020