My hands are shaking. Just a little bit. It's 11:48 PM and my apartment is dead silent and I just finished Chhapaak on Netflix and I feel… hollow. Like someone scooped out my insides and replaced them with something heavy and cold. My couch, which is usually my happy place, my little island of comfort, feels weird right now. The cushions are too soft. The blanket is too warm. It feels wrong to be this comfortable after watching something so… uncomfortable.
I feel sick. Not in a bad-movie way, but in a visceral, physical way. That scene. The attack. I knew it was coming. We all know it's coming. But when it happened… I had to press the spacebar. I paused it. I just stared at the frozen image on my screen for a full minute, listening to the hum of my fridge. And then I un-paused it and I couldn't look away but I wanted to so badly. The sound design. Oh my god, the sound design. That sizzle. It's going to be in my head for days. I actually had to put my hand over my stomach, I felt this knot forming there. A real, physical knot. That's a first for a movie.
And the scene after. The mirror. The first time she sees herself. That's the part that's really burned into my brain. It's not a big, screaming moment. It's quiet. It's terrifyingly quiet. The way the camera just holds on her face, on Deepika's face. She's not crying, she's not wailing. She's just… processing. Trying to reconcile the reflection with the person she knows she is. That one shot, where her eyes are just wide with a horror that's deeper than any scream. That's what's going to stick with me. That's the real horror. Not the act itself, but the living with it after.
It's making me think of this one time in 10th grade. I had this giant, pus-filled pimple right on the tip of my nose. It was huge. And I had to give a presentation in front of the whole class. I could feel everyone's eyes on it. I could feel their thoughts. I remember wanting to just disappear, to just melt into the floor. And that's so stupid. So monumentally stupid to even compare. It's a pimple. It goes away. God, the privilege of even having that thought. Never mind. It's not the same. It's not even in the same universe. But it's the only thing my dumb brain can grab onto to try and understand a fraction of what she must have felt every single day.
Deepika Padukone. Is she even acting? I don't think she is. I think she just… became Malti. There's no artifice, no "look at me acting" moments. It's just raw. And Vikrant Massey. He's so good. He's not the hero who swoops in to save her. He's the guy who just stands there, next to her. He holds the bag. He makes the tea. He listens. He's an ally, not a savior. And that feels so much more real and so much more powerful.
But now that I'm typing this… was the movie itself… a little bit… standard? The structure of it, I mean. The whole thing with the lawyer, the courtroom drama, the montage of them building the case… I was so invested, I was cheering for them. But now, with a bit of distance, was it a little bit… made-for-TV? Did the straightforwardness of the storytelling do a disservice to the chaos of the reality? I thought I loved every second of it, but now I'm questioning if I just loved the subject matter. Was I manipulated? Probably. And honestly, I'm okay with that.
Watching this on Netflix is such a weird experience. I paused it three times. Once during the attack, once to go make chai because I needed something to do with my hands, and once when my phone buzzed with a stupid TikTok notification in the middle of a really emotional courtroom scene. The jarring whiplash of seeing a video of a cat falling off a table and then immediately cutting back to a dialogue about the meaning of justice… it's a very 21st-century way to watch a movie. It breaks the spell, but it also makes it feel more… real? Like this horrific story is invading my normal, dumb, meme-filled life. It's not contained in a dark theater. It's here, on my laptop, next to my half-empty mug of chai and my buzzing phone.
And the message. It's not just about acid attacks. It's about how we look at people. How we judge. How we reduce a person's entire existence to a single event, a single scar. The headlines, the whispers, the "pity." The movie makes you angry at the perpetrators, but it also makes you angry at society. At us. It makes you look in the mirror and wonder about your own prejudices, your own casual cruelties.
I don't know. My brain is fried. It's an important film. A necessary film. It's also a heavy, heavy film. I don't think I can watch anything else tonight. I'm just going to sit here in the quiet for a bit.
Okay. I'm done.
9/10. - solid
-ishaan