There has been a tradition in modern crime fiction in the West – going back at least to the novels of Thomas Harris (Hannibal series) – of the brilliant investigator who is nearly as unstable as the killers he is pursuing: the powers of immersion or empathy that enable him to understand the psychopathic mind, keep him teetering along the sanity-insanity divide himself. This trope has long become a cliché, with very few interesting variants now, but watching the opening scenes of the new thriller Forensic I wondered if it was being taken to comical new heights.
Here is forensic genius Johnny Khanna (Vikrant Massey), sauntering into a room where a woman has recently died. Clearly full of morbid happiness at being alone with the body, he performs a little moonwalk in his scrubs, then warbles “Johnny Johnny” to himself in a child-voice. “Yes, darling?” he replies with a change of tone, and the paraphrased rhyme continues – “Khoon hua kya? Yes darling” – all the way to “Open your mouth” (as he examines the corpse’s teeth) and the gleeful “Ha ha ha” when he figures out what happened. For good measure, he then recites a short couplet in Hindi.
One reason why this sequence is jarring (matters of good taste apart) is that Vikrant Massey, fine actor though he is, suffers from what might be called too much likability. Massey emits such a strong Decency Vibe that you feel like pinching his cheeks and offering him a cream biscuit even when he’s stabbing a dummy with a knife while shrieking “I will kill you!” (in an energetic but unconvincing effort to get inside a serial killer’s mind).
However, there’s a bigger problem with the early scenes depicting Johnny as a creepy, possibly unbalanced, fellow who may have his own split-personality issues: they lead to nothing at all.
The film had begun with a short prologue, set in an indeterminate past, where a disturbed little boy apparently murders his father and sister. When the story moves to the present day, the first person we meet is the weird “Johnny Johnny”, and there is room for the possibility that this is the grown-up version of that little boy – that Johnny might be as much criminal as crime-fighter, a Dexter in Dehradun. But as the narrative continues, it becomes clear not just that this isn’t the case, but also that those tics we saw in Johnny’s first scenes were nothing more than a way of giving him a flashy introduction – making him seem cooler, edgier than he actually is. Or maybe just providing some meat for the trailer.
At any rate, by the halfway mark, Forensic has settled down into a more conventional murder procedural – and Johnny, though still smart-alecky at times, is now behaving more or less like a regular person. Maybe it’s the change in climate that makes him more poised and sensitive, and a little less prone to reciting nursery rhymes: he has been called to Mussoorie to assist an investigation into the kidnapping and subsequent murder of a little girl on her birthday.
Complicating matters is the fact that he and the cop leading the investigation, Megha (Radhika Apte), used to be romantically involved and things have soured between them. Further tension comes from Megha’s family situation: her young niece Aanya now lives with her after a tragedy a few years ago, but misses her father (played by Rohit Roy), from whom she has been separated. And Aanya is around the same age as the girls who are now going missing and turning up dead after a run-in with the “Birthday Killer”.
This is the set-up for a story that involves the emergence of many suspects and red herrings, including a dwarf and another child with a history of psychological problems. But despite the many things that are simultaneously going on here, Forensic is inert in the telling. Even in dramatically charged moments where revelations are made and crucial information (or a new danger) comes to light, the writing is so bland that everyone sounds like they are reading passages from a school textbook. An urgent scene between Megha and Aanya’s father is shot like a standard-issue soap opera confrontation with hackneyed dialogue; lines like “The killer won’t do anything to her for another three days – because her birthday is only after three days” are delivered lethargically.
Neither Apte nor Massey does anything too wrong (her performance mainly consists of looking either surprised or annoyed as if she were a stand-in for the viewer), but they needed a better script, and a film with a sharper sense of pace and rhythm. There are a couple of serviceable supporting performances by Vindu Dara Singh as a helpful cop (much like his father, Singh seems to be a version of a benevolent Hanuman in everything he does), and by Prachi Desai as a psychiatrist, but in the end nothing can save Forensic from its lack of conviction.
Also, no spoiler here, but I figured out the “who” in this whodunnit quite early (not having watched the identically titled Malayalam film that this is a remake of) – it’s simple enough if you go with the tenet that the murderer will be the most innocent-seeming character who doesn’t seem directly linked to the crimes. There is some fun to be had in watching the protagonists figure out the complicated details of the “why” and the “how”, and the backstory involved (who does that boy in the prologue turn out to be?), but I spent much of the film’s overwrought climax giggling to myself, much as Johnny does in his opening scene. “Open your mouth / Hee hee hee” probably wasn’t the desired audience response to a crime story about grisly child-murders.
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