Jaane Jaan review: Jaideep Ahlawat and Vijay Varma are sufficiently creepy in this watchable thriller

Jaane Jaan starring Kareena Kapoor Khan, Jaideep Ahlawat and Vijay Varma is adapted from Japanese author Keiga Higashino’s novel The Devotion of Suspect X. (Screen grab/Netflix)

In a recurring sequence from Netflix’s Jaane Jaan, ‘Teacher’ played by Jaideep Ahlawat has a duel with one of his students. Both try to snatch a coin, shared by the intimate space between their open palms. “Tumhara kaam sikke ko bachana hai, mujhe haraana nahi,” he tells the student. It’s a silly little game that is repeated until it becomes the metaphorical convoy for a thriller’s ambiguous emotional core. Sometimes the only way to save something you truly love, is to step away from it. Love and lust form the ballast of this sufficiently eerie mystery that though underhanded in terms of direction, manages to just about entertain if not enthrall.

Set in misty Kalimpong, Jaane Jaan brings together a troika of brilliant actors. Kareena Kapoor plays Maya D’Souza, a single mother, trying to rebuild her life away from a salacious history. This history arrives at her doorstep in the form of her abusive former husband, Ajit, played with trademark broodiness by Saurabh Sachdeva. An altercation with this pest from the past ends in a crime.

It just so happens that Maya is also neighbours with the aforementioned teacher, a creepy balding Ahlawat, who practices genius mathematics and indigenous karate. It’s an implausible combination that the actor’s discomforting body language, his unsettling gaze manages to commit to the reality of this unlikely world.

Teacher in his own unorthodox ways, also likes Maya. He stalks her, spookily hangs around her air, and looks at her discomfortingly. The genius of his mathematical pursuits evidently can’t furbish the geometric outlook of his social existence. He repels most things, unsettles most people and in a nerdy sense, keeps to himself.

Hot on the heels of Ajit (an ex-cop), comes into town the Mumbai-bred policeman Karan, played by the sprightly Vijay Varma. Varma and Teacher are actually classmates from their school days, the immediate takeaway from which is a plain form of mutual respect. A more gradual study, however, reveals something more sinister and insincere.

On paper Jaane Jaan is fairly twisted, eerie and near ludicrous in its motifs. Two if its three characters – barring the somewhat jaded and clueless Maya – are perverted in an unspecified way which makes them as fascinating as they also seem gratingly opaque. Adapted from Japanese author Keiga Higashino’s novel The Devotion of Suspect X (already also a film), at the heart of the Sujoy Ghosh directed film are the ideas of love and lust acting as blurring agents against a broader climate of justice that prevails over a thriller’s map. A crime is investigated, but so is the nature of attraction and the corruption it concocts with the human mind as its own personal petri dish. Here it distorts the ideas of self and the other, as both Karan and Teacher transact with morality through the lens of attraction. It’s fascinating but also a tad rushed and underexplored which leaves you with the sense that these characters could have maybe used a longer running time (maybe a mini-series?).

Ghosh’s directing is adequate, but also stops short of being mercurial. Kalimpong is mimed more than it is mined for the air of mystery it could so easily have yielded. We get the misty walkways, the twinkling lights of a hillside beaming with quietly defiant lives and yet there is little else to the mannerisms, to the very economy of life offering itself for a reading. That the hills make for the ideal place to hide from your previous self, is rarely extrapolated beyond the exoticness of the physical location. Yet again, a Hindi film director struggles to model a story around the snail-paced ethos and moody aesthetic of a hill town that will hopefully someday reflect in something fitting of the place’s toilsome lifestyle. It’s precisely why Kareena Kapoor’s casting as Maya, as the subject of the vigorous, at times lustful gaze of unreliable men makes formative sense, until it is urged to step into shoes of function. Other than a trite sequence inside a Karaoke bar featuring the song that gives the film its title, Kapoor is asked to do little with the sensuality that she so thrilling exhibited in Don (2006). Here she is a mumbling mess of victimhood and feminine distress, the fig leaf of unrighteousness her co-stars enjoy, having been kept from her out of reluctance or worse, respect.

Jaane Jaan isn’t Ghosh’s finest nor is it a taut thriller in its own right. It hammers through its quietest moments, while fumbling tones that work against its own sense of darkness. It nearly wastes its biggest star in Kapoor, but is repeatedly rescued and resuscitated by its two leading men, diabolically coiled around the axis of a knotty design. With source material this promising, something ought to give. That something comes in the form of the performative meat that Jaideep Ahlawat and Vijay Varma graft onto the cinematic skeleton of a film that then looks wicked as opposed to just sickly.

Jaane Jaan is now streaming on Netflix.