Sanchita
Bheed is an unrelenting, uncomfortable yet necessary look at the Covid lockdown tragedy. The black-n-white Anubhav Sinha directorial is a poignant throwback to the plight of migrant workers.
Read Full Bheed Movie Review –
Rating: 3/5
Director: Anubhav Sinha
Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Bhumi Pednekar, Pankaj Kapur, Ashutosh Rana, Aditya Shrivastav, Dia Mirza, Kritika Kamra
Runtime: 1h 52m
Storyline:
Bheed scrutinizes people from all walks of life, dealing with this unprecedented, bewildering situation of the Covid pandemic. The scene is set against a roadblock at the rural border – lower-caste cop Surya Kumar Singh Tikas (Rajkummar Rao) is put in charge to ensure the barricade stays put, to control the spread of the virus.
A quite literal Bheed shows up at the crossing – from an upper-class lady (Dia Mirza), an empathetic journalist (Kritika Kamra), a watchman (Pankaj Kapur), a power-tripping politician, to a cement truck stuffed suffocatingly to the brim with migrant workers.
Food and patience have run out, panic is at an all-time high but religious prejudice and class conflict still happen to persist. Muslims offer food that a Hindu man sneers at and turns away, even as a bus full of children cries with hunger behind him. A waif-like, mud-streaked girl struggles to find her way out of this mess with an alcoholic father in tow.
Shot entirely in black and white, Bheed is unrelenting and uncomfortably harsh, but in the end still a story of the indomitable human spirit.
What Do We Think:
The choice to make Bheed black-n-white was interesting and seems to have worked in its favour. With all the colours bled out, the gloominess stands out more vividly.
It is a heart-wrenching watch – filled with bleak visuals of barefoot migrants walking with bleeding toenails, sleeping on railway tracks as a thunderous train approaches, and stepping out of a cement mixer in shocking hordes.
Sinha examines the inherent bias that people desperately cling to even when they’re feeling the most cornered and vulnerable. Pankaj Kapur and Rajkummar Rao deliver a particularly hard-hitting scene on bigotry- wherein Pankaj as the watchman belonging to an upper caste, tries to show Rao’s lower-caste cop his place.
The entire cast has done a commendable job. Pankaj Kapur shines the most in Bheed – you can sympathize with his plight yet hate him for prejudice. Rajkummar Rao and Bhumi Pednekar give top-notch performances without missing the dialect. However, their love-making scenes seem out of the place in this film. Rajkummar has a nuanced character – who has internalized the caste differences but in the end, is still determined to make the change.
The tension in Bheed is maintained throughout – but it finishes on a rather anti-climatic yet hopeful note.
Hit Or Miss:
Bheed makes for a quite difficult and depressing but still necessary watch, throwing back to one of the darkest times in the country.
(Also Read: Rajkummar Rao BUYS Janhvi Kapoor’s Juhu House For ‘XX’ CRORES!)
