Crazxy Review

Girish Kohli's Crazxy is a film that's easy to root for. Unconventional by Hindi cinema standards, it stars indie favorite Soham Shah in a race-against-the-clock thriller set almost entirely inside a moving car. Shah, a striking figure in independent cinema, is widely admired for his work on Tumbbad, the 2018 fantasy horror he both produced and starred in - a passion project that famously endured a multi-year production. On its release, Tumbbad became one of the most celebrated films of the past decade, and its 2024 re-release brought it renewed commercial success. Author-turned-debut-director Girish Kohli also boasts an impressive resume writing for films like Mom and Kesari.

Yet, Crazxy takes this promising confluence of talents and delivers a strange, unnerving, and often unintentionally funny film. The camera trails Dr Abhimanyu as he drives through Delhi in his Range Rover, a duffel bag stuffed with five crores in crisp Rs 2,000 notes sitting in the trunk. His phone never stops ringing. First it's the head of his department, barking orders about delivering the cash for an out-of-court settlement over a botched appendectomy. But then comes a call from an unknown number - they have his daughter, Vedica, and they're demanding the same five crores as ransom.

Through a relentless stream of calls from an impatient kidnapper, a domineering lawyer, a suspicious cop, a panicked ex-wife and a disgruntled girlfriend, Abhimanyu's impossible dilemma unfolds: he must choose between saving his daughter and saving his career. Adding another dimension is that he has been an absentee father, who has abandoned his daughter, unable to get over her Down's Syndrome.

Crazxy has a singular hook - it unfolds almost entirely on the road, driven both literally and figuratively by Soham Shah's character. This narrow focus makes pacing and performance all the more crucial.

Clever camera angles keep the visuals from getting repetitive in this one-actor, one-action film. But there is a lack of grittiness and real sense of urgency even in its paciest stretches. As Abhimanyu navigates Delhi's wide streets, effortlessly steering his Range Rover, the city appears oddly sterile and sanitized - even a glimpse of a landfill feels eerily pristine - lending scenes the polished sheen of a high-end car commercial.

Inside the car, Shah's character scowls his way through an escalating series of phone calls but remains unflappable - even as his ex-wife grows hysterical and his girlfriend threatens to cause a scene. While his calm demeanour fits the profile of a senior doctor, it's far from riveting to watch him maintain the same expression of mild irritation, his hands fixed at the 10-and-2 position on the steering wheel, even in the film's most desperate moments.

Even when the film reaches its dramatic peak - featuring a burst tire, a high-risk operation and a child in jeopardy - the pacing remains frustratingly limp. With a background score that can't decide if the film is a dramatic thriller or a screwball comedy thriller, it splits the difference and swings between both extremes. The result is an off-tone, slack drama that veers off its intended path.

A significant theme of the film revolves around Vedica's Down's Syndrome - a genetic condition in which children are born with three copies of chromosome 21 and suffer physical and mental development challenges. Any cursory search on the Internet will reveal those suffering from Down's to be some of the most loving, kind-hearted people on the planet. Yet, the depiction of the condition is disturbingly off-the-mark - the climax is a real shocker for all the wrong reasons - and antithetical to the message it seems to want to send about the condition.

By the end of Crazxy, little remains of its initial promise - though, thankfully, the film wraps up in a brisk 90 minutes. While there are flashes of unexpected humour, especially in the passive-aggressive exchanges between Abhimanyu and his ex-wife (voiced by Nimisha Sajayan), the film suffers from the absence of a seasoned directorial hand. The longer it runs, the more its nuts and bolts come loose, revealing insipid writing, an incoherent score, and the one-note performance of its lead actor.