'Rahu Ketu': an uneven blend of mythology and comedy

Movie review: Rahu Ketu.

Cast: Pulkit Samrat, Varun Sharma, Shalini Pandey and Chunky Panday.

Director: Vipul Vig

Rating: 4.5/10

Rahu Ketu starts off like someone who has just had a brilliant idea and can’t wait to say it to everyone. It begins with the confidence of a film that believes it has cracked something special. Mythology meets meta comedy, a little karma and two celestial entities are dropped into the hills of Himachal Pradesh with a divine mandate to clean up corruption. It’s a genuinely intriguing starting point.

Shadow planets from Hindu mythology brought to life by a magical diary? On paper, this sounds like a rare Bollywood film that dares to think differently. Sadly, the film seems just as surprised by its own idea as we are and never quite figures out what to do with it.

Director Vipul Vig throws folklore, slapstick comedy, social commentary and self awareness into one cinematic blender. What comes out isn’t a smoothie. It’s a lumpy overfilled mess that keeps spilling everywhere. Vig never figures out how to balance the competing tones. The film doesn’t so much progress as it meanders. Scenes appear, make noise and vanish, leaving behind the faint feeling that something was supposed to happen but didn’t. Instead we get a story that lurches from one sequence to another without momentum or purpose.

Varun Sharma and Pulkit Samrat cast as the titular Rahu and Ketu remain the film’s safest bet. Their chemistry is easy and occasionally charming enough to lift otherwise flat scenes and sometimes the only reason you don’t mentally check out. Sharma leans heavily into familiar slapstick territory, doing what he does best with his cartoonish timing and buffoonery. Samrat plays the calmer and more composed half of the duo.

They start clueless, stay clueless and end clueless, which might be thematically accurate but dramatically, its exhausting. The problem isn’t their performances, it’s that the film gives them nowhere interesting to go. Shalini Pandey’s Meenu enters with attitude and promise but exits as one of the film’s most confused creations. Her character keeps changing lanes without indicating, making it hard to invest in either her intentions or her performance.

Amit Sial brings restraint and dry humour as a morally compromised cop and he provides brief sanity. Piyush Mishra once again plays the mystical storyteller, radiating gravitas while the script politely ignores everything he has to offer. Chunky Panday as the antogonist feels like he wandered in from another louder movie and decided to stay.

Visually, the film is far more composed than its writing. The cinematography captures Himachal Pradesh in India in beautiful, soothing frames. The camera knows when to pause and that’s something the screenplay never learns. The dialogue has some flashes of wit, but many jokes are just stretched too far.

At heart, Rahu Ketu wants to talk about karma, fate and imagination. Ironically, it shows very little discipline in any of the three. It confuses randomness with creativity and volume with humour. By the time the film reaches its wandering climax, you’re no longer asking how it will end, you’re wondering when it will. Perhaps shorter and refined, it would work well on stage as a play. There’s a clever film buried somewhere inside Rahu Ketu. Sadly, I think it’s stuck in retrograde.

Keshav Dass is a presenter on Lotus FM and hosts The Night Café, Monday to Thursday, 9pm to midnight.

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