Director: Ajay Bahl
Writers: Ajay Bahl, Pawan Sony
Cast: Taapsee Pannu, Gulshan Devaiah, Abhilash Thapliyal, Krutika Desai Khan
In terms of psychology alone, Blurr is somewhat similar to Vasan Bala’s recent Monica, O My Darling. Both are Hindi whodunits that – through their final twists – reveal the perils of social consciousness. Both stories are driven by the lethal desire to be seen by a world that often sidelines supporting characters. Whereas Bala’s film uses the narrative language of Bollywood as a medium, Blurr employs actual blindness as an allegory. Its protagonist, Gayatri (Taapsee Pannu), is slowly losing her eyesight while battling to uncover the hilltown mystery behind the death of her blind twin sister, Gautami. Despite the evidence, she refuses to believe that Gautami died by suicide. So every character, including Gayatri’s own husband Neel (Gulshan Devaiah), acts shady. At one point, a senile old caretaker literally foreshadows the film’s conflict; he laments that nobody notices people like him, that he is invisible, until they need his help. And that’s the problem with Blurr. The execution is too self-serious to realize the complexity of its themes. The movie is too preoccupied with being scary, suspenseful, stylish or clever to empathise with – or even understand – the humans within.
After Looop Lapeta (Run Lola Run) and Dobaara (Mirage), Blurr is the third Hindi remake of a European film starring Taapsee Pannu this year. This time it’s the 2010 Spanish thriller, Julia’s Eyes. Unlike the other two, however, there’s a dull sense of replicating without really reading into the original. Pannu’s Gayatri experiences a whole lot of trauma as a person – losing her loved ones, her vision, her bearings, her sanity even. But her performance makes it hard to invest in Gayatri beyond the immediate threat to her life. I appreciate Pannu’s eclectic choice of scripts and her screen presence, but Blurr is all design and no instinct. Gayatri’s grief is never allowed to breathe. The perpetually jolted expression rarely conveys a broader depth. It’s also awkward writing. It’s often about what’s happening to her within a moment, in isolation to the rest of the story; the tone is totally different in the next scene, with some sequences entirely missing transitions and chunks of exposition.