Okay. My brain is just… soup. A colorful, chaotic, Hindi-song-blasting soup. I just finished Ludo on Netflix and it’s almost 2 AM and my roommate thinks I’m having a seizure because I just keep staring at the black screen on my laptop. I’m not even sure what I watched. Was it four movies? Was it one movie? Was it just a really long, really weird music video? I don't know.
So, first things first, I watched this on my couch, obviously. Like, who goes to a cinema anymore? I was curled up under my blanket, my phone buzzing next to me with notifications I kept ignoring, and at one point I paused it for a solid ten minutes to go make a mug of noodles because I just *couldn't* deal with all that tension on an empty stomach. That’s the OTT life, man. You control the chaos. You can pause the chaos to add more chaos to your stomach. Netflix just kept asking, "Are you still watching?" YES, NETFLIX, I'm still watching, I'm just trying to process the fact that Abhishek Bachchan just played the most unhinged, lovable, murderous "Bhai" I've ever seen. And that song. Oh my god, that song. "O Womaniya." I’m gonna be hearing that in my sleep.
But there’s this one image that’s just… burned into my retinas. It’s not a big dramatic moment. It’s a plastic bag. A red plastic bag. It’s floating down from a high-rise building, slow, dancing in the air, and inside is… well, you know what’s inside if you’ve seen it. But the way Anurag Basu shot it. It was like the most important character in the movie for those five seconds. It was just… chance. Pure, dumb, random chance. And that’s the whole movie, right? That bag is the whole movie. It’s this beautiful, stupid, terrifying symbol of how one tiny, floating thing can just wreck everything or connect everything. I literally leaned forward, my noodles forgotten, just watching that bag drift. My heart was pounding. For a plastic bag. What is wrong with me?
And that brings me to Akash and Shruti. The whole "let's pretend to be in a relationship to make my ex jealous" trope is so old, it’s basically a fossil. But… damn it, I fell for it. I fell for it hard. The rain, the train station, the way he looks at her when she’s not looking. I was a goner. I thought I was too cool for that, too cynical. But now that I'm typing this… was it actually kind of dumb? The whole setup? The blackmail video? I don't know. Maybe it was dumb. But it worked. It just… worked. My heart did that stupid flippy thing it does when I see something hopelessly romantic. I hate it. (No, I don't.)
This whole interconnected lives thing… it reminds me of this one time I was on a train to Delhi. It was a night train, one of those shitty ones with the stiff blue seats. I was sitting opposite this guy who looked exactly like a younger version of my uncle who died years ago. He was reading a book, and every now and then he'd look up and smile at this little kid a few rows ahead who was crying. Then, at like 3 AM, the train stopped in the middle of nowhere. Power went out. Everyone was freaking out. And that guy, the one who looked like my uncle, he just calmly started telling a story. A loud, booming voice in the darkness. He told this ridiculous story about a talking monkey and a king who lost his keys. And the whole car went silent. Everyone was listening. Even the crying kid. We were all just… connected by this random guy's story in the dark. And then the power came back on, and he just went back to his book like nothing happened. I never saw him again when we got off the train. It was nothing. It was everything. That’s what this movie feels like. A bunch of strangers on a dark train, and someone just starts telling a story.
And the COLORS. God, the colors. It’s like someone smashed a Crayola box and snorted it. Everything is so saturated, so vibrant. Even the blood looks pretty. It’s like a comic book. A really violent, really sad, really funny comic book. I feel like I need to re-watch it just to catch all the little details, the way the stories weave together. The dice roll at the beginning, the little ludo game pieces moving across the screen. It’s all so… deliberate. But it also feels so random. I can’t decide if it’s genius or if it’s just a mess. A beautiful, beautiful mess.
My eyes are burning. I have to be up for a lecture in like, five hours. I should sleep. But I can’t. I can still see that red plastic bag, floating, floating, floating down.
7/10. - decent
-ishaan