A Thursday movie review: Yami Gautam's hostage drama operates strictly outside the realm of believability

Bollywood suspense dramas have found a new home in the digital space and this week Yami Gautam Dhar led A Thursday joins the league. The thriller, however, stands out from the herd for being one of the preachiest hostage dramas you might have laid eyes on.

A Thursday wastes no time in introducing Yami Gautam’s character, a kintergarden teacher Naina Jaiswal as a warm and well loved teacher whose cold and sinister persona is simply one zoom in close-up and suspenseful background music away.

While the character makes for the worst kidnapper in the history of time who first announces to the police she has held kids hostages and later decides to lock doors, the film there on takes us on a desperate ride to believe that she is the bad guy in a build-up that’s way too long.

The whole hum-drum of affairs that you’d expect to unfold after someone reports such a hostage situation then unfolds and a media circus, police vans, snipers, crying parents, demands and negotiations - it all begins and then goes on for good hour revealing nothing of the plot or of the kindergarten teacher’s past or motivations who one fine day arrived at work ready to kidnap kids.

The kidnapper played by Yami, more than anything seems to be lucky she getting by with her demands simply because the party she’s blackmailing is as bad at their job, as she is at kidnapping. Neha Dhupia and Atul Kulkarni play tough cops who cannot decide on a common approach to get a rescue operation going and the hunt for answers and negotiation efforts only make it more difficult to watch.

On the other end of the spectrum is Dimple Kapadia playing the Prime Minister who approaches the whole matter more emotionally than practically and simply distances you further from the narrative that is already a hard pill to swallow.

The problem with A Thursday lies in the lack of believability. All of director Behzad Khambata’s edge of the seat moments end in disappointment and ultimately lead to a tragically preachy end. The questions the film wants you to ask don’t make you curious enough and the point that the film wants to make is simply squeezed into the last 30 minutes as if decided on a final whim to have it all make sense.

While Bollywood simply seems to have done away with dramas without a social message, all the effort put into the big reveal of it in this particular instance is simply taxing. Moreover, A Thrusday simply doesn’t feel like a tale fit to be conveying a message as on sexual abuse mostly because it is doused by the one and a half hour of noise that comes before the plot even begins to address it.