Hindi Cinema Plot Twists

In today’s weekend blog, it is Bollywood again. Friends you all must be watching Hindi films, and there are certain films where the story takes a twist at the end, which is not envisaged by any viewer. A plot twist is not as simple as it sounds. The “surprise ending” ending cannot afford to be a random leap of faith. It has to be an earned moment, not necessarily something that is designed only to trick the viewer. The best of such films fool us in broad daylight, not only offering an element of shock but also a sense of closure. In Hindi cinema, there have been some memorable plot twists, that no one saw coming.

Here are a few such recent films:

1 Kaun (1999)- directed by Ram Gopal Verma. It still stands as perhaps the most inventive psychological thriller. Imagine a serial killer on loose on a rainy night. A young played by Urmila Matondkar gives shelter to Manoj Bajpai and Sushant Singh in her house. She is shown paranoid and is repenting giving shelter to these two men. All of this puts her in a jittery position, as her suspicion sway between these two men that one of them is a serial killer. The twist, in the end, reveals the dead body of the original house owner, which in turn reveals that the girl was a serial killer all along.

2 Gupt (1997)- directed by Rajiv Rai. It is shown as a love triangle, where Bobby Deol and Manisha Koirala are in a relationship, and Kajol is also shown as blindly in love with the hero. The hero is the main suspect in the murder of his stepfather and is absconding, and Kajol helps in this journey, and slowly even Bobby Deol also starts liking her. The twist comes in the climax when it is revealed that Kajol is the real killer, as she attempts to kill Manisha Koirala, so that she can be with Bobby. Viewers were shocked to see this twist because up till that time Kajol was basically playing the role of the romantic girl in her films, and suddenly she is here as a negative character. This film even fetched Kajol an award for the best actor in a negative role.

3 Khakee (2004)- directed by Raj Kumar Santoshi. In this film, it is shown how a woman has pulled the wool over a macho system’s eye. The film is about a group of Cops headed by Amitabh Bachchan with Akshay Kumar and Tushaar Kapoor, who are based in Mumbai. On receiving the top they go to Nashik to arrest the dreaded terrorist/killer played by Ajay Devgn. Here they meet Ashwariya Rai, who tells them she saw the killer staying near her house. But when they reach the area near her house, the killer has escaped. On learning that he might have fled to Mumbai, they start back to Mumbai, Ashwariya pleads with them to take her with them in their police vehicle as she is now afraid to stay here because she has given them the information. In their journey back it is shown that Akshay and Ashwariya start developing a romantic relationship. In the climax, the plot takes a twist where it is shown that Ashwariya is an accomplice of Ajay Devgn and she is responsible for getting Akshay killed by Devgn.

4 Kahani (2012)-directed by Sujoy Ghosh. In the film, it is shown that a pregnant Vidya Balan reaches Calcutta in search of her missing husband, who was working for some Government secret service department. She contacts Calcutta police. In a spectacularly shot climax, it is revealed that Vidya was only faking her pregnancy to trick the men who were responsible for her husband’s killing.

5 A Wednesday (2008)- directed by Neeraj Pandey. The film featured Anupam Kher as Mumbai Police Commissioner put on tenterhooks by a man (Nasseruddin Shah) who has threatened to bomb the city if four terrorists are not released. Right to the end, it appears that this unnamed man, who is operating from a hi-tech system on an ordinary terrace, is a plain-clothed terrorist who wants his demands to be met. But in a strange turn of events, the released terrorists are assassinated. Further, it is revealed that Nasseruddin is a common man who is sick of watching his city get destroyed by these people.

6  Andhadhun (2018)- directed by Sriram Raghavan. In the film, the twist is not an actual twist-the blind piano player played by Ayushman Khurana, reveals very early on that he is not blind. He becomes witness to the murder of Anil Dhawan, committed by his wife Tabu’s loved (a police inspector). As he is pretending to be blind, he is unable to report the murder. How Tabu and her lover start chasing him when they suspect he may not be blind, and the rest is a pure thriller. But the closing shot of the film truly changes the way we perceive the morality of the ‘hero’. He calmly uses his cane to knock a can out of his path-an impulsive act that suggests how the man never really transformed, still faking his way to his dream. He was, despite earning our sympathy, only the lesser villain in a tale full of them.

Other honorable mentions in this category are Manorama Six Feet Under directed by Navdeep Singh, Being Cyrus directed by Homi Adajania, Talaash directed by Reema Kagti, Ugly directed by Anurag Kashyap, and Ittefaq directed by Yash Chopra.

Waiting for your views on this blog.

Anil Malik

Mumbai, India

22^nd July 2022