Netflix’s Khufiya review: Tabu & Co are bewitching in this spy thriller with conflicting tones

Tabu plays KM (Krishna Mehra), an R&AW operative who has just lost a female asset on the job, in Khufiya. (Photo courtesy Netflix)

“Jab tak duniya desh aur dharam mein batti hai, tab tak ye khoon khrabe hota rahega,” an intelligence official tells a disillusioned asset in a scene from Netflix’s Khufiya. It’s a sweeping answer to a century-old question that distinguishes the all-persuasive euphoria of war from the eerie, discomforting intimacy of espionage. War, though calamitous in scale, disallows you the time or space to contextualize the enemy (at least onscreen). Espionage, on the other hand, is a marathon battle raged across years, made up of moments in which people either give in or give up. Intimacy, thus, is both its instrument and its price. Which is precisely what makes this genre, of witnessing humans toil with the absurd demands and long-drawn costs of espionage, so intriguing. To which effect, Khufiya is a tangled, at times superlative dive into the world of espionage via some fascinating characters and hideous narrative cracks.

Tabu plays KM (Krishna Mehra), an R&AW operative who has just lost a female asset on the job. While she mourns her own incompetence, she is offered a chance at salvation. The cause of her failure has narrowed down to a mole. This mole, the agency believes is, Ravi Mohan, played by an excellent Ali Fazal. Mohan lives with a bubbly, spirited wife in Chaaru (Wamiqa Gabbi) and a sceptical mother played by Navnindra Behl. KM is tasked with spying on Mohan, a project that is far too linear for a film aspiring to the complexity of espionage. There are no twists and turns, moments of doubt or engineered deceit as confusion is instantly culled in favour of a poke that wants us to instead pay attention to things we can’t see coming. It’s what makes Khufiya unpredictable, at times vain, and also wasteful. Espionage merges with personal history which drags with itself an unanticipated streak of revenge, in unforeseen and frankly awkward ways.

Ali Fazal as Ravi Mohan and Wamiqa Gabbi as Chaaru in Khufiya on Netflix.

Directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, the film is goofy, even humorous but not without potholes that cause it to trip and fall every time it gathers a bit of rhythm. Chaaru’s importance to the story is indicated outright but doesn’t quite pan out as you’d expect it to. Instead, it goes on a whole different detour to get to a point where none of the emotional turbulence, its closeted scars, can actually be registered. Speaking of closeted, it probably isn’t giving away much to tell you that Tabu plays a closeted gay person. Unfortunately, that potentially shattering and complex prompt never quite translates into an exploration of gender and identity in the shadow of patriotism. The three occur in vacuums, acquainted but safely distant from each other.

Bhardwaj’s direction is assured but the bridges he builds between acts manifest as narrative bumps. They are abrupt, undercooked and in the case of a six-month interlude that washes by in the middle, possibly frivolous. But then that is the tone of the film itself, somewhere between goofy and self-serious with nary a clue on what exactly to hold onto.

A Tabu-Bhardwaj collaboration is enough to summon curiosity and anticipation, and the former delivers in a performance that deserves its own series/standalone film. But then it’s something you could say about every other Tabu performance; for like wine, she flows across glasses, misshapen or broken, with undeniable control and authority over the medium’s many tastes. Surprisingly, it’s Fazal and his hilariously cunning mom who are the highlight of a film that steers between tonal gaps and leaps so often you have to practically submit to the whimsy of its people, as opposed to the connecting tissue of its world.

No Bhardwaj creation is without its musical devices and here too it plays a key role. It isn’t evocative or stirring per se, but it does the job of a catalyst in an experiment that has no predictable tone, or tentative outcome. The film just stumbles into an ending, because its formative journey itself has snapped in and out of routes. Almost as if some fascinating characters were conceived and then forcibly glued together to attain a rough form of symmetry. Or someone made peace with the scrambled, disfigured nature of the piece, because its singular parts offered lucid potential.

Khufiya has the makings of a whacky espionage thriller, but it can’t seamlessly marry its talented cast to the cogent tissue of a story that adds to their strengths. At times it feels like the characters exist in different worlds altogether, consistently perplexed by the pitch that their collaborators approach them with. One acts like she is in a grim espionage thriller, another in a roomy rose-tinted rom-com, while the mom and son are in a goofy, satirical mashup of high-stakes thuggery of their own making. There is ample meat to cook here and of course a ferocious, bewitching Tabu to play off of, but Bhardwaj plays all his strokes at once. The result is interesting but also frustrating because a more restrained and rhythmic innings would have yielded a victory and not just the one erratic, bedazzling spell of chaos.

Khufiya is now streaming on Netflix.

Also read: Vishal Bhardwaj 2.0: How 'Khufiya' and 'Charlie Chopra...' marks new beginnings for the director