Freddy Hindi Movie
In Shashanka Ghosh's Freddy, Kartik Aaryan plays Dr. Freddy Ginwala, a sociopathic dentist. Freddy has a backstory that explains why he becomes the person he is. Freddy lives alone with a tortoise named Hardy and has a hard time finding the love of his life. He should find it hard because he is creepy. He stares at his date's breast and stalks his female patient for no apparent reason other than the fact that he is a sociopath. He ends up having an affair with one of his patients and does something for her that sees his life spiral out of control.
I get what the makers are trying to do here. The attempt is to make a spine-chilling film about a sociopath, but the movie is unintentionally funny. Shashanka Ghosh makes many mistakes here. Firstly, a sociopathic film character needs neither an explanation nor sympathetic treatment. Freddy is more like Penn Badgley's Joe Goldberg from You than someone who becomes anti-social just because of societal circumstances. You do not want Freddy as your dentist because he will hurt you gentler than most dentists ever will. But the film does not recognize this aspect of its protagonist well enough.
Thankfully, the other characters in the film recognize the flaws of Freddy more than the film itself. As a film, Freddy has a tonal dissonance that never allows it to be coherent. We do not know what kind of person Freddy is, which is a shame for a film named after its protagonist. Some parts of the movie make it worthy enough of being a campy thriller, but the acting is a real downer. Karan A. Pandit is cringe-worthy as Raymond Nariman, even though the more unintentionally funny moments in the film feature him. Pandit attempts to make his character fearsome, but the performance is so cheesy that it sometimes makes you laugh.
Kartik Aaryan's attempt to portray a sociopath is sincere and effective sometimes but flawed mostly. Does it make sense to bend your body to show your low self-esteem? Whenever there is an attempt to emote a particular feeling, Aaryan fails to do it, and the camera does not focus on his face. Alaya F as Kainaaz Irani does a better job of showing the different layers of her character, but it is not necessarily a clever character.
For a movie as dumb as Freddy, Writer Parveez Shaikh's script has some clever one-liners and some juice for a mindlessly pulpy thriller. However, its treatment deprives us of any opportunity to get even some guilty pleasure.
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