Crash Flash:
It can happen only in a film — a flyover in a busy city being always so devoid of traffic that bike riders wishing to make an illegal U turn simply remove blocks from the divider and drive off, leaving them on the road, causing cars to turn turtle and killing the occupants.
It does not say much for the traffic department, cops or the municipality of Chandigarh, that the body count rises alarmingly and nobody but an interning journalist notices. Arif Khan’s crime-horror thriller, U Turn (on ZEE5), based on Pawan Kumar’s Kannada original, is so sloppily written that plot holes are left carelessly strewn around for characters to trip over.
The journalist, Radhika (Alaya F) has been following the unauthorised U turn-and-accident story for months, getting information by bribing a beggar, who conveniently lives by the accident spot — always the same place, as if all of Chandigarh knows where the loose divider blocks are located. For no reason but to prove the ‘modern’ outlook of the makers (Balaji Telefilms) Radhika smokes, drinks and is promiscuous; obsessed with the accidents because she lost her brother in a car crash. In the strangely editor-less newspaper, the ‘deadline word’ never comes up, Radhika routinely tells another journalist to do her research for her, and the piece just never actually gets written!
She also takes it upon herself to teach road sense to the U turn transgressors, whose addresses she gets from a mole in the RTO, by leaving flowers at their door; and her follow up never reveals the grisly aftermath. Till, the cops find her entry registered in the building of the last dead man, and she tells her bizarre story to the investigating cop Arjun Sinha (Priyanshu Painyoli) whose boss (Rajesh Sharma) and teammates are understandably nonplussed, till people start dropping dead on their watch. Then, the boss, instead of pushing for a more detailed probe, suspends Arjun!
There is no other media outlet in Chandigarh, and nobody else wonders just what is going on. When a particular news clip vanishes, it does so from across all web search engines, which is a tough thing even for a skilled hacker to pull off. In the film, several scenes give the impression that there is a supernatural force at work. Random lightening storms, strange sound, windows flying open, spooky apparitions– the stock-in-trade of B horror movies. There are long sequences of a wide-eyed Radhika being terrorised in her apartment, but then the explanation for it all is completely bizarre and far-fetched. That’s not clever misdirection, it’s a con job. Which is a pity, really, because the scares are built up well, and there is curiosity generated about the mysterious deaths.
Alaya F actually holds the film together, pulling out the right emotions required, and not letting the slightest scepticism leak out of those large, expressive eyes, which must have got her the part. The other actors fit their roles without too much effort. A good idea does not often translate into a seamless script, and U Turn is an example of this.
(This piece first appeared in rediff.com)
