Adeel is but one moving part of a flawless, seamless thriller
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.