Vipul Amrutlal Shah’s underwhelming drama relies more on cacophony than coherence – Firstpost

Cast: Ulka Gupta, Aditi Bhatia, Aishwarya Ojha, Sumit Gahlawat, Arjan Singh Aujla, Yuktam Kholsa

Director: Kamakhya Narayan Singh

Language: Hindi

I don’t know but within the first few minutes of The Kerala Story 2: Goes Beyond, I was reminded of Anil Sharma’s The Hero: Love Story Of A Spy. In that globetrotting opus, the filmmaker kind of seduced and sucked us into his gargantuan vision with locales of Canada, New York, Pakistan, and Kashmir within the first ten minutes. The sequel offers no scenic gorgeousness given the bone chilling subject at its disposal. It shows us three horrifying cases of repressed women in Jodhpur, Gwalior, and Kochi. All this happens even before the opening credits begin to roll. The first film in the franchise was based in the state of Kerala and the moniker felt justified. This time, the narrative travels to different parts of India and the tagline says: Goes Beyond. It’s a crash grabbing idea any avaricious filmmaker would gleefully jump onto. To paint a picture of how dark things could get, the opening credits are nothing but a black screen with white words and a background score reaching its crescendo.

Not much has changed for women in the world that the makers of the franchise paint. Monsters masquerading as pious lovers continue to harp on their prey’s naïveté. That they are systematically brainwashed would be an understatement. John Abraham’s
_The Diplomat_ did the same but with far more restrain. Here, the only way to create an impact is to go all out with unapologetic and unhinged provocation. And then screech in press conferences how it’s all inspired by true events. And then the disclaimer says there are some creative liberties taken. It’s a dangerous balance that can severely misinform the viewers. There were multiple victims in the 2023 film, there are three here. Not everything happens swiftly. It’s like that Apple Rahul Bhat peels in Anurag Kashyap’s
_Kennedy_. It all unravels gradually but you are prepared for it.

The three victims are a social media obsessed influencer, a javelin player, and a woman who hails from Kochi. The screenplay keeps juxtaposing between their lives they have, the lives they choose, are the lives they are about to be subjected to. You have already started pitying them. And you already hate the men before they have committed the crime. This is the kind of a film that forces you to react to the atrocities. And everything happens sans any form of coherence or nuance. This is a franchise that would have never existed had the first film not been a blockbuster. It is also the kind of a film where the performances on display unfortunately barely matter. What is the point of appreciating a vehicle when it is traveling on the road to nowhere? And just like the Netflix film
_Accused_, the background score does most of the heavy lifting while the characters inhabiting the story stay mum and morose.

It’s never a good feeling when you’re constantly reminded of the films of yore while watching a film of 2026, unfortunately. So there’s another scene where a character says there are 56 crore unmarried Hindu women in India and they won’t leave even one. The character is a Muslim so no need to elucidate what he means. We can see the Indian map in the background painted green from top to bottom. So which film this scene reminds me of? Thy name is Qayamat: City Under Threat, which came out in 2003. Remember the pista cake of the shape of the Indian Map an army general of Pakistan is eating? He nonchalantly slices Jammu and Kashmir from it and says how the state will soon belong to their country. But at least that film had camp and cheese to camouflage the silliness of its written material. Where do we go here? There’s no brooding Ajay Devgn, no Nadeem Shravan, and no rollicking Chunky Panday.

The template is nearly the same, oscillating between repentance and revenge. The people are black and white. No 50 shades of grey. At least there were some moments of pathos in the first film, barely any rousing moment here. Movies like these are often labeled as propaganda. It’s still hard to decipher or decode what that exactly means.
_The Kerala Story 2_ could also be labeled the same, but that’s one of its least problems. It could have genuinely been a gripping and jolting film had the makers relied more on coherence than cacophony. If it works, there will be a third film too. The second one has already gone beyond. Where will the third one go? Think!

Rating: 2 (out of 5 stars)

The Kerala Story 2 is now running in cinemas