Dark comedy tag doesn’t save Hasmukh

Rating: 1.5/5

Who or what is ‘Hasmukh’? I thought for a while after finishing the finale of the Vir Das’s special dark satirical crime drama. The synopsis of the film had given me chills — it felt like something out of Hitchcock.

Hasmukh proves that it takes more than a good synopsis for a movie to be interesting. It is crippled with cliches and muddled with logical fallacies; fails at making the intended points. Vir Das’s stand-up comedian charms took a long vacation during the production.

We can’t blame Vir; a film or a series is a director’s game and Nikhil Gonsalves manages to make everything that has a nuance of dark comedy in it sound so bland.

This was the synopsis: “A small-town comic’s long-awaited break takes a dark turn after he realises committing murder is the only way to keep his onstage energy.” If you are a film buff, I’m sure a great movie just flashed right before your eyes. That’s the potential that these few words had, but sadly it is now ruined forever.

A big part of the film’s failure is the performance by the actors. Vir Das does an okay job and so does Ranvir Shorey; the rest of them just come and go with off-putting expressions and completely scrambled timing.

While the film tries hard to sound progressive by showing a strong woman character and a critique of popular names in politics and Bollywood, Hasmukh is also fairly regressive.

The “village boy who comes to the city” is shown very patronisingly (the very same village boy who kills people for ‘onstage energy’), and there are women who are ready to have affairs because there are job positions to maintain. " ‘Hasmukh’ acts like if you kill some and stash the body, the case is completely closed. The desperate tag of ‘dark comedy’ doesn’t save Hasmukh from a lack of logic and bad writing. Above all, it is not funny.