Vikrant Rona (2022)

aka VR

Several decades ago (the film officially speaks of “almost half a century”, and I’m not sure if this is supposed to mean the late 70s or the early 80s). A small Indian village somewhere in the middle of a tropical forest is hit by a series of possibly supernatural occurrences and serial killings that suggest a nasty occult ritual is going on. One of the victims is the village’s chief of police. The place is also basically overrun by smugglers, so there is the potential of all of this being a nastier version of the old Dr Syn gambit.

In a curious twist of fate and very suddenly, extremely macho cop Vikrant Rona (Sudeep) appears in the village. He quickly starts taking care of business, swaggering and threatening when he isn’t actually investigating. He’s clearly stirring something up, too, for there is a series of attempts on his life. Though, to be fair, these may very well be caused by all the testosterone the guy is oozing causing allergies.

Freshly returned to the village, young Sanju (Nirup Bhandari) becomes also involved in the investigation, in between bouts of wooing the delightful Panna (Neetha Ashok). These two start on their own parallel investigation that will eventually lead them to a rather horrifying suspicion.

I believe Anup Bhandari’s Vikrant Rona is the first Kannada language movie I’ve seen or written about here. Sensibility-wise, the film is close enough to what I’ve known of contemporary Hindi or Telugu cinema, so it wasn’t much of a problem for me to appreciate its brand of stylized, sometimes wonderfully moody, sometimes loveably silly, slickness. Tonally, I’d actually compare it with Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee movies from Hong Kong, only that Vikrant Rona mixes its twisty mystery with a smidgen of horror not with wuxia but with a bit of melodrama and action in the patented Indian manner.

The action is of the wonderfully overblown and entertainingly overdirected style that’s typically for most of what I’ve seen coming from India right now, in its own way as disinterested in proper fighting techniques as a modern wuxia or a superhero movie, going for maximum loudness, heft, and visual impact. Which can go terribly wrong in the hands of some directors (repeat “Michael Bay” ten times in front of a mirror and he will appear, but only for a tenth of a second, because then the first edit happens) but is just a whole lot of fun here. Particularly enjoyable are an early fight scene on a smuggler boat during a storm that also moonlights as a bit of a musical number, meant to establish Vikrant Rona’s bona fides as an asskicker, and the grand finale that starts as one of the more insane (that’s a compliment) dance numbers I’ve seen and turns into a riot of stunts, peculiar fighting techniques and colours. But whenever else VR punches someone, it is still the beginning of a very good time for the audience.

Speaking of musical numbers, while I’m not the biggest fan of the heavy use of autotune as a vocal effect on generally already very high voices some of the music has going on, as a friend of 70s Hindi cinema, I was rather happy with the pretty traditional way most of them were integrated into the plot, usually to express intensified emotions via choreography that’s just as fun in its own way as the action sequences are.

Speaking of “fun”, given the nature of the killings in the film and certain elements of the plot I’m not going to spoil, I found myself surprised by the general sense of it during the proceedings. It’s not that the film doesn’t have a sense of or respect for its own Indian Gothic (for lack of a better term) elements and the emotional heft of some of the story it is telling, it’s just that these elements so regularly are subsumed under VR’s absurdly overblown machismo (so overblown I couldn’t even get annoyed at it) and the joyful way the film throws out its many, many twists and turns (some of which are pretty damn obvious, some come as really cool surprises I wouldn’t have believed this particular film to get up to), this film of terrible secrets of the past, family suicide and child murder never feels all that emotionally threatening. And because the Vikrant Rona really is that fun, this isn’t an actual weakness but just the basic facts of its nature.