Satyabhama (2024) Review

In one of Satyabhama's opening scenes, ACP Satya (Kajal Aggarwal) charges into a jail cell and beats up some perps to pulp. The camera presents us with tantalizing fragments of the beating - Satya's red-saree, her taut ponytail, her knuckles bloodied from the torrent of punches she lands, and finally, a pile of her broken bangles. Satya was off-duty - on route to her wedding, in fact - when she was summoned to do the interrogation. When she finally shows up hours later for the ceremony, Amar (Naveen Chandra), her fiancé, smiles a knowing smile and marries her anyway.

You want all of Satyabhama to be as clever and exhilarating as its opening sequence. But that's the last of it. The best parts of the film - over and out in the first ten minutes.

If Satyabhama was an attempt at building up Kajal Aggarwal as a strong "female hero", then it nails that effectively. Kajal gets a slew of entry and elevation shots. She gets to stare into the camera and say "I'm not done, yet" and some other such overripe dialogues. She aggressively fights groups of men. Basically, she gets to have fun with the kind of trite scenes that any average male hero in a mainstream flick is offered as his birthright.

As a crime procedural, though, Satyabhama is a god-awful mess. The plot centres around the search for a man who narrowly escapes after killing a young woman whom Satya has promised to protect. Haunted by her failure, Satya doggedly pursues him. This is where the narrative starts to drop in tropes by the truckload - dirty cops, tampered CCTV footage, a perp escaping his hospital bed. By midway, there is a kidnapping, a brewing terrorist conspiracy, and the repeated use of a virtual reality game to do exposition. As new characters pop up and new storylines overcrowd the central plot, the film crescendos to maddening levels of confusion.

There is an art to crafting mystery, to seeding certain questions in the minds of the audience while answering others. But Satyabhama replaces such intrigue with irritation. To make matters worse, the story dips into melodramatic character backgrounds - songs and love montages - out of a misplaced desire to engender emotionality. Meanwhile, Satya appears to spend more time "serving face" than doing any real detective work.

We must laud female actors finally breaking into a space once reserved for men - we recently saw Samantha Ruth Prabhu go warrior-mode in Yashoda; Nivetha Thomas and Regina Cassandra kick ass in Saakini Daakini - but also acknowledge that they still are relegated to a narrow strip of the boys' playground. It is as if a female hero must justify her presence in the story by grappling exclusively with female issues - sex trafficking, forced pregnancies, domestic abuse. So anxious is Satyabhama about colouring inside these lines that it throws in a completely superfluous sub-plot about sex slavery.

One of the film's few praiseworthy bits is the loving relationship Satyabhama shares with her husband. Naveen Chandra, accustomed to playing problematic men (Month Of Madhu, Ammu), looks pleased to be playing Amar, the supportive husband who isn't insecure about his wife's ambitions. At no point does the narrative tamper with their dynamic, but it is still such a rare element in a film that it is almost eerie to behold.

Satyabhama is in many ways Kajal's film - it slacks when she is not on screen. But the horrendously convoluted script hardly does her any good. If this is the standard of scripts that a leading female actor can hope to work with, one shudders to imagine what slim pickings other women have.