JOIN US'Window Seat' review: A lost opportunity
Window Seat
Kannada (Theatres)
Direction: Sheetal Shetty
Cast: Nirup Bhandari, Sanjana Anand, Amrutha Iyengar
Rating: 2/5
Sheetal Shetty’s debut effort ‘Window Seat’ falls short of being a gripping police procedural. She shows signs of an able filmmaker in the last act, where the film, after running in circles, becomes a decent whodunit.
Nirup Bhandari plays Raghu, a loner who sings at a high-end restaurant, owned by Amrutha Iyengar’s character called Anjali. The film begins with fairytale-like one-sided love story as Raghu falls for a girl (Sanjana Anand) he sees through his window seat during his daily train journey.
The proceedings don’t burst with energy and it’s tough to root for the protagonist. There is nothing novel in the script as we see Anjali, like many sidelined heroines, trying hard to get the attention of Raghu. What seems like a romantic drama turns a thriller when Raghu sees the girl being killed on the balcony one day.
It appears Sheetal didn’t get a free hand as a director as she forces songs and worse, comedy during serious situations. The attempt to make people laugh during investigation sequences is so poor that it makes you squirm.
The director pays the price for not sticking to one genre when, despite couple of superb twists, the film rushes towards the climax without rhythm and ends abruptly. Lekha Naidu delivers an interesting performer as a ruthless cop but the rest of the cast falls flat, with Nirup Bhandari being the weakest of the lot. The actor’s dead-pan expressions and laidback body language weren’t big issues in ‘RangiTaranga’ (2015) because the material was brilliant. But in films which require performances to lift the script, he needs to shed his style and bring life to his characters.