REVIEW: DILLI KAAND

Producer-Director- Krittik Kumar

Star Cast- Sam Sundesa, Kaashvi Kanchan, Preetika Chauhan, Shahbaz Baweja, Virendra Saxena, Amit Shukla, Reem Khan, Shashank Sethi, Mona Mathew and Rajesh Singh

Genre- Social

Rating- **

Delhi Gang Rape Retold!

Jyothi Venkatesh

This film is a fictional account of the gruesome Delhi rape case that shook the country almost nine years ago and sets out to chronicle the events leading up to the horrific rape, the shoddy investigation and the death of the victim that had a far reaching impact on the collective conscience of the nation.

This is nothing but a blatant attempt to cash in on the shoddy incident that tainted the capital of India forever.

Alishka, (Kaashvi Kanchan) the only child of doting parents, joins a college that is far away from home.

When in the college, some Eve-teasing is common in the college try to victimize her, a smart, brave, co-student, Sameer( Sam Sundesa), stands by her, and hey presto, forget about even an iota of logic, in a jiffy, falls in love with her.

She has similar feelings, but does not reciprocate or express them as fast as Sameer.

Then there is an unconnected scene, where a bunch of young boys offer to take a foreign woman to the Greater Kailash (GK) area, when the auto-rickshaws she stops refuse to head in that direction.

They hail a cab, and rape the woman along the way, as if rape is a day to day routine affair in the capital.

The director continues to stretch the plot by including a couple of duets with the hero and the heroine which ends in the boy proposing to her followed by a dinner date In the extended suburbs in Delhi.

In a slightly similar scenario, skin to the Nirbhaya episode held nine years ago, Alishka and Sameer are waiting for public transport to head back home after dinner, when a passing bus stops, and they are offered a ride, but sadly they do not know that this will prove to be the biggest mistake of their life, as the six men on board, including the driver, are hardened criminals, and Alishka is easy prey. They first beat-up Sameer and then take turns at raping her.

Not content with violent rape, their sadistic leader takes great joy in mutilating her private part with an iron rod.

As far as the performances go, while Kaashvi Kanchan stands out with her good looks, innocence and grace and renders a sterling performance as the rape victim Alishka, Preetika Chauhan plays the role of the tough reporter half heartedly without putting in any efforts and looks like she is more of a cop than an earnest reporter with her attitude.

Sam Sundesa is just about average as Sameer woos Alishka, Reem Khan scores as Madhuri the mother of the rape victim and Virendra Saxena underplays the character of Manoj, the father .

Among the six rapists, it is Shahbaz Baweja who scores with his expression as Rizwaan the leader.

Krittik Kumar has made a reasonably fair film but his undoing is that the film has been able to see the light of the day six years after his film was launched.

Music by Shshank Ranjan is melodious and catchy but serves as a handicap to the pace of the film.

To sum up, all that I can say is that Dilli Kaand is a sloppy and haphazardly-put-together script that makes a mockery of such a spine-chilling crime of magnanimous proportions like the Nirbhaya rape kaand which rocked Delhi as well as the nation