My heart is trying to beat its way out of my chest. It's 1:48 AM and I just finished Khuda Haafiz on Disney+ Hotstar and I feel like I've just run a marathon through a nightmare. My couch, my safe space, feels like it's been in a scuffle. The blanket is half on the floor. My laptop is burning a hole through my jeans. I need a glass of water but I'm pretty sure my legs have forgotten how to work.
That first half. That first half is just a slow, deliberate punch to the gut. I was so comfortable, you know? Just chilling, watching this sweet, simple romance bloom between Sameer and Nargis. It's all so... wholesome. And then it's just... gone. Ripped away. And suddenly I'm not watching a romance anymore, I'm watching a man's entire world evaporate in front of his eyes. I was curled up in a ball on my couch, hugging a pillow, and I just kept getting smaller and smaller.
There's this one scene. It's stuck on a loop in my head. Sameer gets that one phone call. The one where he hears Nargis's voice for the first time since she disappeared. And she's not okay. You can *hear* it in her voice, the terror, the pain. The way the sound is all muffled and distant, like she's speaking from the bottom of a well. I literally took my headphones off and checked my audio settings, that's how real it felt. I was leaning so close to my screen, my nose was almost touching it. I could feel the desperation coming off Vidyut Jammwal in waves. It wasn't acting. It was a transmission. I felt like I was eavesdropping on something horribly private and real.
It reminds me of this one time, I must have been like, 16, I lost my phone at this massive music festival. And for about an hour, I couldn't find it. I was panicking. Not just because of the phone, but because of everything on it. The photos, the contacts... my whole life was in this little brick. I was running around, asking security guards, calling it from my friend's phone, just getting voicemail over and over. That feeling of complete and utter helplessness. Of knowing something precious is out there, somewhere, but you're powerless to get to it. Of course, I found it in the lost and found an hour later. But that little taste of panic... that's all I could think about during that first half of the movie. That feeling, multiplied by a million. Never mind. It's a stupid comparison. It's not the same at all.
And then the second half happens. And Sameer goes to save her. And I was pumped. I was ready for the Vidyut Jammwal action hero stuff. And it's there. The fights are brutal. Messy. Not graceful, like his other movies. Desperate. But now that I'm typing this... was it a little bit... too easy? I mean, not easy-easy, the guy goes through hell. But he's basically one man against an entire human trafficking syndicate in a country where he doesn't know anyone. And he just... kind of figures it out? I thought I was on the edge of my seat, loving every second of it. But was the villain actually a bit of a caricature? A mustache-twirling bad guy who's just evil for the sake of being evil? I don't know. My adrenaline was pumping so hard I probably didn't notice how thin the plot was.
Watching this on Hotstar at home was such a weird choice, in retrospect. I kept pausing it. Not because I was bored, but because I needed a break. During one of the interrogation scenes, I just hit pause, walked to my kitchen, and stared into my fridge for like five minutes, just to remind myself that I was in my apartment, not in some dark, dingy warehouse in a fictional Middle Eastern country. The dark scenes, too, looked so murky on my laptop screen. I was squinting, trying to make out faces in the shadows. It probably added to the tension, but it also made me feel like I needed an eye exam. And the sound... I had to wear headphones. I couldn't have my neighbors hearing those screams.
So yeah. I'm a mess. It's not a fun movie. It's not a date night movie. It's a heavy, exhausting, visceral experience. It's designed to make you feel angry and helpless and then, maybe, a little bit of catharsis. Did it work? Yeah, I think it did. But I also feel like I need to watch a compilation of cat videos for the next three hours to cleanse my palate. It's the kind of movie that sticks to you. Like a bad smell, or a really important memory. I'm not sure which yet.
Okay. My brain is fried. I'm done.
7/10. - decent
-ishaan