Guilty (or Talvar in the film’s native tongue) is a curious
hybrid of drama-documentary, police procedural and campaigning rally call. It
focuses on a notorious double murder of a teenage girl and her middle class
family’s servant in India in 2008 and what would appear to be one of the most
shocking miscarriages of justice in any judicial system.
Clocking in at 132 minutes, the film gets through a lot of
story without falling into the 60-second scene, followed by 60-second scene,
followed by 60-second scene, etc, chain gang. As the film moves through its
true twists and turns, the audience feels shock, horror and disgust at
ever-escalating police incompetence: crime scenes contaminated, key evidence ignored
or lost, important questions not asked, etc.
Some semblance of proper police work arrives in the form of
the ever-impressive Irrfan Khan (star of The Warrior, Life of Pi, Slumdog
Millionaire, and The Lunchbox) as a lead investigator from the Central
Department of Investigation (CDI), called in to run the case properly: he asks
the right questions and understands the importance of forensics.
And all too soon, he arrives at a completely different
conclusion to the local police. But he’s no saint, he’ll bend the rules to get
to the truth. With the case apparently solved, a change at the top of the CDI
finds Khan out on his ear, and another investigator is handed the case… And
then the film moves into its shattering third act.
There are awkward moments in the film, tonal shifts that don’t
quite work, possibly caused by observations of Indian culture being lost in
translation and because of the film’s mash-up of genres.
And there is no escaping that despite director Meghna
Gulzar’s attempts to be as objective as possible, some characters are treated
with greater sympathy than others, and certainly I felt the outcome was a clear
miscarriage of justice.
But that statement needs some fleshing out: whether the
parties found to be guilty are guilty is almost a moot point; the key point is
the utter failure of the justice system to carry out its task as effectively
and rigorously as possible.
If you have any interest in policiers, then you must see
this.
Score: 7/10
No release date is
confirmed yet.
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