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Hands Across India: Reflections of Politics in Recent Indian Thrillers

Christopher Kaiser

• 6 min read
The fugitive father of the film Joram, riding in the back of a truck packed with passengers.
The fugitive father of Joram. Photo courtesy Makhijafilm

On January 20, millions of Indians joined hands in a line reaching hundreds of miles across the state of Kerala in an act of political protest.

I'll admit I was surprised to learn that a plot element from Jordan Peele's Us (2019) - maligned at the time for being unbelievable, despite being a fantastical spin on a real charity event - has turned into real life. In 2020, nearly 6 million people formed a similar chain in Kerala. The target of their protest was India's ruling party, the far-right BJP, which believes in a single cultural identity for India and has become more and more autocratic.

In 2023, I felt politics looming behind a lot of Indian films. And while some had bold statements to make, most were understandably too timid to point fingers at the real villains in power. Here is a brief overview of how Indian politics crept into a few of the films of 2023:

PATHAAN

India (Hindi language), 2023, d. Siddharth Anand, 2h26m, Streaming on Amazon Prime and VOD, **

After 5 years absence, 2023 was the year that Bollywood's biggest star, Shah Rukh Khan, returned to lead roles with three movies. The first was a big splash in terms of box office and rowdy sell-out crowds, but I felt it was a limp fish and emblematic of the worst impulses in Bollywood cinema right now. The worst trend: cinematic universes. With Pathaan, the studio decided that instead of starting a new cinematic universe, it would retroactively create a successful one out of several previously unrelated action franchises. Characters from Ek Tha Tiger (2012) and War (2019) appear in Pathaan, making the cast one of the most stacked in recent memory. Unfortunately, swagger alone cannot carry a film, and the action in this Mission: Impossible knockoff is absolutely terrible.

The default villains in Indian spy films are Pakistanis, but Bollywood films also don't want to totally alienate their large Muslim audience. So Pathaan takes the most pathetic way out it possibly can, by making the villain a rogue Pakistani general who is also being helped by a rogue Indian official to set off a terrorist attack, for the sole endgame of fomenting a new war. None of this does anything to alleviate the real problem that India's government is fomenting fear and violence against its own Muslim citizens.

JAWAN

India (Hindi language), 2023, d. Atlee, 2h49m, Streaming on Netflix and VOD, ****

Shah Rukh Khan in the movie Jawan poses dramatically with an assault rifle.
Photo courtesy Red Chillies Entertainment

The 2nd Shah Rukh Khan movie of 2023 was the one that delivered the goods. Jawan starts off with a brilliant heist of a commuter train that will keep you wondering are these the bad guys? What are their motives? I don't want to say much more so as not to give anything away, but there's an unlikely Charlie's Angels quality to this that is surprising and entertaining. The songs are not as good as in Pathaan, but everything else is better here: the action scenes are imaginative and thrilling, the story has bonkers twists and turns, and even the cameos are handled with substance rather than as deus ex machina.

While the politics are not much better, I never really expected a Shah Rukh Khan movie to take a stand against the government directly. The money and influence in Bollywood is probably too close to political power. It's also a convenient fact that massively wealthy businessmen can influence the government fairly openly in India, so they make an easy villain with no collateral damage. This sort of "Robin Hood" type story addressing wealth inequality in India is very popular in Indian cinema right now, giving voice to people's anger while accomplishing nothing that would be dangerous to those in power.

Despite not breaking any ground politically, for entertainment value alone it's worth watching, and the political anger behind it may very well be authentic.

JORAM

India (Hindi language), 2023, d. Devashish Makhija, 1h59m, Not yet streaming, ***1/2

A desperate father clings to his baby, swaddled and strapped to his chest, in a remote village in India.
Photo courtesy Makhijafilm

A father finds himself on the run from the police with his 3-month-old baby precariously strapped to his chest in a sling. Framed for murder, the poor villager doesn't understand what's going on and is alone in India's most populous city, so he flees to his village. A young Mumbai cop is reluctantly sent alone on a manhunt to remotest India, to a village with only one power generator next to a tree which is the sole source of wi-fi and smartphone charging.

While the first half of Joram is an incredibly tense thriller, it soon reveals itself to be more of an arthouse drama with an angry political message. The villager discovers his hometown has been transformed by a mining company from a jungle paradise into a dirty and barren desert. The Indian government's drive for economic progress, and the corrupt process that corporations use to earn government contracts, has stolen the land and dignity of its own indigenous people. The rapid industrialization of rural India has brought with it injustice and imbalance, as whole ways of life were upended. Promises of jobs to make up for the loss of agricultural work have been lies.

Joram is an indie but is being distributed by one of India's biggest streamers. It seems like a remarkable political statement to have come from the Hindi-language industry and is also a good representative of the growing trend for realism in Indian films.

JIGARTHANDA DOUBLE X

India (Tamil language), 2023, d. Karthik Subbaraj, 2h52m, Streaming on Netflix and VOD, ***1/2

A filmmaker in Bollywood is trying to earn the favor of his Chief Minister (the governor of an Indian state) to turn to politics but is being thwarted by a rival using local gangs to keep his movie out of cinemas. So he calls in a favor to get the leaders of these gangs assassinated by disgraced ex-cops. Kirubakaran - who was framed and jailed for murder - is given a chance for his freedom if he can kill Caesar, the leader of the "Jigarthanda Film Club", a gangster obsessed with Clint Eastwood. He poses as a protege of director Satyajit Ray and proposes to make the gangster into the first Tamil movie star, while proposing increasingly dangerous scenarios to try to get Caesar killed.

Jigarthanda Double X was one of the most gorgeous looking films of 2023, in part due to its commitment to a '70s aesthetic that includes spaghetti westerns, but the plot is over-complicated and takes a while to get to the point. The last act turns into a plot now familiar from political Indian films: Caesar discovers that his village is being ravaged from afar by its corrupt state government. The fake film they were making (on unsuitable Super 8 film), turns into a real political film.

Ultimately, Jigarthanda Double X is more interested in its love for the power of cinema than in any political message, but it stumbles backwards into a fairly stirring depiction of political protest. If you can get past the confusing first act, it's still an entertaining watch with a lot more ambition than typical Hollywood fare, and that's already earning JDX its own cult following.

Bonus recommendation:

Fargo (Season 5)

Streaming on Hulu

After two mostly forgettable seasons and a long COVID hiatus, the anthology series in homage to the Coen Brothers darkly comic sensibility has returned with a doozy. At first, I was skeptical of the tale of a Minnesota housewife with a dark past fighting off bounty hunters Home Alone-style, while a "sin eater" from ancient Wales wanders in and out of the story like Anton Chigurh crossed with Werner Herzog. But now that it has wound up as a haunting portrait of American exceptionalism and late-stage capitalism, I have to wonder how Fargo's upper midwest setting never amounted to such a political statement before now.