Anaamika

Let's cut to the chase. If you have seen Kahaani, you will find Nee Enge En Anbe underwhelming. That Sekhar Kammula is not interested in a frame-by-frame remake of Sujoy Ghosh's film and wants to stamp his fingerprints over this film is established the moment he introduces his heroine. Unlike Vidya Bagchi in Kahaani, Anamika, here, is not a pregnant woman to instantly earn our empathy and trust; she is an ordinary young woman who claims to have come from the US to India (Hyderabad, in particular) in search of her missing husband, Ajay Swaminathan. It shows that the director isn't worried about putting himself in a tighter spot and is willing to do his share of heavy lifting. In fact, he effectively shows how such a young woman could also be vulnerable — one cop wants her to share his bed in exchange for information on her husband, while another berates her and blames her after noticing that she has failed to button up her top.

Anamika is helped by Parthasarathy ( Vaibhav), the only Tamilian in the police station, who develops a crush of sorts over her. Meanwhile, she is told by encounter specialist Amjad Ali Khan that Ajay is actually Milan Damji, a terrorist, who masterminded a horrifying bomb blasts months earlier. Anamika refuses to accept it as she sees this as a cover-up by the police to hide their inefficiency. Meanwhile, a hit man is murdering the people she had gone to asking for help, and everyone is interested in a hard drive that could be the key to solving the whole mystery.

While the audacity to deviate from the original is appreciable, the deviations that Kammula and his co-writer Sai Prasad bring in to the basic plot of the original are what, sadly, let this film down. The Hindi version was essentially an elaborate act of cinematic rug-pulling and yet, it always felt plausible (at least while we were watching it) and also explained the hows and whys in a convincing manner. Here, the final reveal only leaves us with more questions that need answe...