‘Arishadvarga’: Kannada thriller is all set to hit theatres by this month end

mangaloretoday.com

Mangaluru, Nov 24, 2020: ’Arishadvarga’, which has done an extensive round of film festivals, including a world premiere in London in June 2019, Asian premiere at Singapore South Asian International Film Festival, and North American premiere at Vancouver International South Asian Film Festival, is all set to hit theatres by the end of this month.

Written and directed by Arvind Kamath, ’Arishadvarga’ is his new venture. He seems very protective of his work, is also a bit self-indulgent and can be hard to follow, not to mention the multiple unreliable narrators for various sections of the story. Nevertheless, it is a gripping film.

A movie producer has been murdered in an upscale bungalow in Bengaluru. Who is the culprit? No one knows, but a pair of unlucky would-be actors are the primary suspects, and it’s going to be up to them and one dogged detective who doesn’t like to play by the rules to figure this one out in Kamath’s new Kannada language thriller.

Arvind Kamath’s style is very contemporary neo-noir, not unlike some of the best thrillers of Tamil film industry, and Bollywood. Arishadvarga does an admirable job in this regard, keeping its audience in suspense until the very last minute, making its two-hour plus run time seem to fly by.Arvind Kamath projects his characters motivated by such desires in order to sustain through the scenarios. All of it as a whole makes up for a compelling whodunit thriller which doesn’t present every card upfront. Most of what the film presents is in a puzzling form which takes this neo-noir to a better level.

The two actors, Anish (played by Mahesh Bung) and his female counterpart Saakshi (played by Samyukta Hornad), are caught in a web of deceit designed to frame them for the murder of the producer Manjauth Bhat (Avinash Yelandur) that there’s almost no way to untangle. They are soon met by police inspector Ashok (Nanda Gopal), at which point the story gets even more complicated. There is a mysterious woman giving directions be phone, a Peeping Tom who sees a bit too much, and a ton of other side plots and narrative red herrings to keep the proceedings lively.

Anish, the male actor entrapped in the murder plot at a patsy, has seen his big screen dreams stepped on so many times that he’s resorted to working as a gigolo to make ends meet. It’s in this capacity that he’s invited to the Bhat home, but it is his ambitions as an actor that end up getting him in trouble and providing motive. Saakshi, on the other hand, is actually at the house for what she thinks is an audition, but things don’t go well for either of them.

Through it all there is inspector Ashok, a hard-boiled film noir type policeman who takes to guff and believes no one. He’s a hard ass, the kind of man who would’ve been a private dick in a classic noir, but here he’s a surly detective on the force who doesn’t care much for the rules. He’s only interested in the truth, and he doesn’t care what lengths he has to go to in order to find it. Along the way he’ll encounter avarice, ambition, infidelity, and any other vice you can think of, keeping the action fresh along the way for the viewer.

By the time Arishadvarga finds its conclusion, the audience is a bit spent, but mostly in a good way. This kind of twisty thriller is fairly common in Indian cinema, they do love their double crossings and conflicting narratives, but this kind of film is typically told in a more crowd-pleasing kind of big budget masala version, rather than a down and dirty straight noir, making Kamath’s film a breath of fresh air.