89 (Manoj Michigan)

The Bengali film 89 is all about crime, thrill, ambition for success at any cost and how it effects psychological conditions. Purba (Raima) goes through a journey of incidents filled with X factors.  She starts exploring the sequences to arrive at the cause of her mental turmoil, an unexplained problem. This brings us to the question related to the title of the film.

The story is a systematic exploration of the case. It is credible and logical, but races through thrills and twists at every turn. What enhances the thrills is the alternative format of story-telling.

The film, directed by Manoj Michigan, is described as a psychological thriller that revolves around three key characters, a mental patient, a psychiatrist, and a police inspector.

The theme revolves around a lot of psychiatry and even hypnosis in psychiatry, delving into field-based theories, deductions and jargons, although beyond understanding.

Purba Banerjee (Raima Sen) plays the central protagonist of a psychiatrist with psychic problems. When diagnosed, interesting facts even those about her past gets revealed. While most characters in movies today track down their past, Purba, amusingly, searches down her ‘past life’ to track down her problems. Upon the realization that her problems are interlinked with that of a serial killer, Sabyasachi Pal (Saswata Chatterjee), she decides to visit him. An anti-terrorist officer, Anup Bhargava (Shataf Figar), also the man in love with her, helps her through it.

We have an interesting sociopath who had murdered 89 people and was caught in his 89th act. His aspiration is to get to 90. Saswata Chatterjee makes for a good orator, while he is narrating his exploits.

Raima Sen, while confident, appears a tad too serious all the time. For that matter, everybody except the serial killer, appears dead serious in this non-linear narrative, taking us in and out of Purba’s troubles.

The narrative offers a crash course in bad parenting, which was touted to be the root cause of the temperament of the serial killer (all problems begin at home, don’t they!). The frames are filled with deliberate intensity and even though there is enough material to accomplish a neat drama, the movie, it falters towards the end, where the climax descends quickly from the logical tree, and appears unripe and slightly under developed.

While 89 is a good movie to watch, the characterization could have been a bit more intriguing.