Alaya F in a still from U-Turn. (courtesy: YouTube)
Cast: Alaya F, Priyanshu Painyuli, Rajesh Sharma, Manu Rishi Chadha and Aashim Gulati
Director: Arif Khan
Rating: Two stars (out of 5)
Remake No. 7 (in as many years) of the 2016 Kannada-language mystery thriller of the same title, U-Turn makes significant changes to the plot in the hope of minimising tedium. But the twists that it takes recourse to represent marked but not-so-effective departures. They dilute the supernatural element that underpinned the original film and delivered the scares.
Alaya F, in a role that has been played by Shraddha Srinath (Kannada), Samantha Ruth Prabhu (Telugu and Tamil) and Koel Mallick (Bengali), among others, carries the film on her shoulders. In the guise of a rookie journo investigating a series of mysterious deaths linked to traffic violations on a Chandigarh flyover, she does not let the strain show.
As for the film, it never finds the right direction nor hits the desired pace. Part spooky drama, part police procedural, part neither here nor there, the Zee5 film, directed by Arif Khan and modified for Hindi audiences by screenwriters Parvez Sheikh and Radhika Anand, begins promisingly enough and appears for a while to be on course to developing a meaty middle.
U-Turn, eventually, peters out as it takes a drastic detour from the substance of the story that served the Kannada, Tamil and Telugu versions directed by Pawan Kumar. In the end, the film cannot but be one too many because a Hindi dub of the Samantha starrer is available on a streaming service.
Every single year since the production of Pawan Kumar's U-Turn, a rehash of the film has been served up. It was the Malayalam-language Careful, directed by V.K. Prakash, in 2017 and a Tamil-Telugu bilingual in 2018.
In 2019, a Sinhala version, celebrated Sri Lankan cinematographer Channa Deshapriya's directorial debut, saw the light of day. It was followed by a Filipino remake in 2020 and a Bengali one (titled Flyover) in 2021 with Koel Mallick in the lead role. It is unlikely that there has ever been a film that has seen as many iterations in such quick succession.
There is obviously a limit to how much an idea can be stretched. The Hindi U-Turn shows clear signs of overkill as the search for a new serial killer leads the film down a road that does have a surprise or two lurking at a few of its bends but obviates the film's potential for genuine suspense and tension of the sort that the previous versions generated.
The opening shot of U-Turn is an exact replica of what it was in the Kannada film. An upside-down camera records the flow of traffic on a flyover. As the frame turns and straightens, a young man (his face concealed behind a helmet) stops his motorcycle, moves a couple of divider blocks and makes a quick U-turn through the gap. He does not deign to put the blocks back in place. Seconds later, a car hits them and overturns.
That is only the tip of the iceberg. It is soon divulged that as many as ten traffic rule violators, all of them motorcyclists, have died within 24 hours of committing the infringement. A young journalist, Radhika Bakshi (Alaya F), who is working on an investigative report about the string of fatal accidents on the flyover, is suspected of being the killer and arrested by the police.
One inspector, Arjun Sinha (Priyanshu Painyuli), has doubts about Radhika's involvement but Sub-Inspector Surinder Yadav (Shreedhar Dubey), cussed to the core, jumps the gun. He asserts that the girl is guilty. The tussle between the two cops takes its own course even as Radhika, who allowed to leave the police station after a preliminary interrogation, launches her own probe to get to the bottom of the truth.
The police station has two other cops in a bit of a hurry to close the case - the officer-in-charge H.S.P. Saxena (Rajesh Sharma) and forensics man Inderjeet Singh Dhillon (Manu Rishi Chadha), who frets more over his diabetes than his duties. Some humour is sought to be squeezed out of the latter's antics and utterances but to no avail.
U-Turn has a handful of sequences that bank on the fear of the unknown stalking the protagonist but nothing that the film comes up with by way of shocks at the audience is consistent and forceful. From a suggestion that a ghost is to blame for the deaths to veering towards a more commonplace explanation for a befuddling phenomenon, the film makes an ill-advised U-turn in its final act.
As the plot unfolds, at least two individuals have a reasonable motive to go after the rule-breakers. The identity of one of them is revealed pretty early in the film. That of the other takes much longer to come to the fore - in fact, it is part of a climactic twist that is hard to anticipate. But when the revelation happens, it borders on the contrived.
Alaya F and the character she essays are, collectively, about the only bright spot in U-Turn. She successfully conveys Radhika's quandary, personal and professional, as the mysterious deaths continue to occur and she decides to put herself in harm's way.
Among the other actors, Manu Rishi Chadha stands out. Priyanshu Painyuli and Shreedhar Dubey, too, have their moments but the script allows them no extra elbow room for manoeuvre.
Early in the film, Radhika, who lives alone in Chandigarh, has a conversation with her mother (Grusha Kapoor) on their way to a bus terminus. The female protagonist in the earlier films had their mothers berating them for not getting married. But Radhika and her mother do not talk marriage - they talk about the girl's sexual adventures.
But no, once the candid exchange between mom and daughter is out of the way, Radhika seems to go all straightlaced and begins something akin to a relationship with Aditya Iyer (Aashim Gulati), a journalist who works with her. But no real sparks fly between the two. It is a strictly staid affair. That is pretty much true of the film as a whole.
Alaya F and a couple of passable twists apart, U-Turn never quite finds a way around the dead-end that it runs into.