Kadak Singh Review: Pankaj Tripathi Does Just Enough To Hold The Film Together

Pankaj Tripathi in a still from Kadak Singh. (courtesy: YouTube)

Seldom does a Ponzi scheme investigator face a test as stern as the one that the amiable but unyielding protagonist of Kadak Singh is up against. He is a man with a past but with no memory of it. As he recuperates in a hospital, he takes it upon himself to put the scattered pieces back together with the help of the reminiscences of others.

National Award-winning director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s third Hindi film (after Pink and Lost) centres on a now on, now off investigation into a chit fund scam that has cleaned out countless lower middle-class investors. It is a veritable jigsaw puzzle with large pieces missing.

The case of the missing millions isn’t unusual nor is the manner in which it is presented. It is the fragile psyche of the sleuth that sets the procedural apart from others of its kind. But the slow and steady Kadak Singh isn’t the sort of whodunit that will zap you out of your mind.

Scripted by Ritesh Shah with a story written by him with the director and Viraf Sarkari, employs a fragmentary, multiple-perspective structure in which the chain of events is viewed and processed through the eyes of four characters. It reaches its conclusion when the protagonist has heard enough to be able to offset his memory blackout.

Kadak Singh, streaming on Zee5, moves back and forth in time and space. It gives the impression of being repetitive and circuitous. A set of people who have seen the man up close – his daughter, a couple of colleagues and a friend – provide their individual perceptions of the protagonist, Arun Kumar (AK) Srivastava (Pankaj Tripathi)

AK, an officer with the Kolkata unit of a financial crime investigation agency, has been diagnosed with retrograde amnesia. He is unable to recognise people around him or recollect the details of the probe that he was spearheading.

The delicate state of his mind is a result of neurological damage caused by an alleged suicide attempt. But what exactly happened on the day that AK was wheeled into a hospital is shrouded in mystery. He obviously remembers nothing.

AK is in the capable hands of the hospital’s hawk-eyed, chatty head nurse Miss Kannan (Parvathy Thiruvothu), the only person in his immediate circle he now recognises because she is part of his current reality. Everybody else has receded to the background.

As the widower’s daughter, his boss, a trusted younger co-worker and a woman he is in a steady relationship with visit his ward one by one – he has no idea anymore who they are. He, however, falls back on the ‘stories’ that they narrate to try and figure out who he is and how he has ended up in a hospital.

In the opening moments of Kadak Singh, AK saunters into a seedy suburban hotel hand in hand with a younger woman. There, he chances upon a girl (Sanjana Sanghi), who is visibly startled on seeing him. She flees from the precincts. Arun pursues her out of the building.

Cut to the hospital bed, where AK has a visitor. It is the girl he ran into in the first sequence. She introduces herself as his daughter Sakshi. AK looks at her blankly. He asserts that he has only one child – a five-year-old son.

The nonplussed girl tells AK that he is mistaken. He does indeed have a son but he is now a teenager. She narrates her story in an attempt to jog his ‘memory’ and convince him that she is his biological daughter.

The girl even tells him why he is Kadak Singh for his children. Scrupulous to a fault and a perfectionist who has no patience for slip-ups, he lets those traits affect his style of parenting.

Thus begins a series of interactions. Naina (Jaya Ahsan), a woman Arun has been in love with presumably since before the time he lost his wife in an accident that his children hold him responsible for, is the next visitor.

She provides another window on a past that has been wiped clean from AK’s mind. Naina’s recollections, like those of the others who call on him in subsequent scenes, help him dispel the fadeout he has suffered, besides aiding the audience in understanding what is going on with and around the man.

AK’s boss Jitender Tyagi (Dilip Shankar) turns up next followed soon after by another colleague from the department, Arjun (Paresh Pahuja), a man referred to by AK’s children as “asli beta” so fond is he of him. From their separate mist-lifting perspectives, the two men recall what transpired in the lead-up to the incident that ended with AK being rushed to hospital.

Kadak Singh is a family drama, a white-collar crime story and an investigative thriller. It isn’t the sort of pulsating, edge-of-the-seat fare that one would go to the end of the world to watch, but it has a few passages that work well enough to be mildly diverting, thanks particularly to Pankaj Tripathi’s restrained, if somewhat limited, performance.

The mystery of AK’s hospitalisation revolves around his quirky, difficult to gauge demeanour, which often raises the question: is there more to his behaviour than meets the eye? What are the answers that his memory loss conceals that he must find in order to get out of the maze that the sudden turn of events has pushed him into.

Its muted methods notwithstanding, Kadak Singh does, at times, spring to life, riding on the intricacies of the case that AK was investigating until its progress was interrupted and the surprises springing from the acts of remembering and forgetting and forming linkages between disparate shards of memory that begin to coalesce little by little and take the form of a coherent whole.

The role that Pankaj Tripathi plays does not push him out of his comfort zone but he does just enough to hold the film together. The actors around him – Jaya Ahsan, Sanjana Sanghi, Dilip Shankar and Paresh Pahuja – have largely reactive roles, confined as they are to closed spaces physically and creatively.

Not outright humdrum, Kadak Singh would have had far greater tensile energy had its edges been sharper.