There is something about a pulpy potboiler that can’t be ignored. It’s not exactly eyeing to be in the annals of great cinema or literature. It succeeds if you turn the page if you keep watching. Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba, the second edition to the 2021 thriller Haseen Dillruba, sheds the prequel’s flab of the small-town comedy and finally owns its mushy, menacing heart. It offers enjoyable cheap thrills till it gets entangled in the web of its own narrative. What begins as engaging increasingly turns into an ambient watch. It becomes dragging and convoluted. You stop caring how they did it, as long as they got away.
Don that backless blouse, stick that rose stem in your hair because dangerous lovers Rani (Taapsee Pannu) and Rishu (Vikrant Massey) are back. The action has now shifted from Jwalapur to a less fictional Agra. Both Rani and Rishu are laying low after the events of the first film. One is suspected of killing, the other of being alive. They cross paths in the cinematic rain, avoiding each other’s eyes more out of fear than longing.
They talk via wireless earphones in a busy market or an isolated garden, like love-struck secret agents. But as always, there is the third man. Sunny Kaushal plays Abhimanyu, a medical compounder who is simping after Rani. He runs after her autorickshaw, holding two mannequin heads (she works at a parlour and forgot them back home. It’s romantic). Red roses in hand, he waits for her outside a movie theatre after buying all tickets for An Action Hero, a forgotten gem from the house of Colour Yellow Productions (the banner behind Hasseen). It really is some love.
The cops, too, aren’t far away. Fresh on the case is Mrityunjay Paswan (Jimmy Shergill), a police inspector with a personal motive. He is the uncle of Neel—the smug hunk played by Harshavardhan Rane in the original film—who was the first victim of Rani and Rishu’s explosive romance. It’s all too convenient, but one plays along, waiting for the smarts, curbing the urge to say, ‘Oh, I know how this is going to pan out’. Written by Kanika Dhillon (Manmarziyaan, Judgementall Hai Kya), the film pretends to be sharper than it is. The dialogues are schmaltzy and at times illogical. “Pyaar do logo mein hota hain, teen logo mein saanp seedi kheli jaati hain (Love is between two people, three can only play a game of snakes and ladders).” A line that seems straight out of a WhatsApp uncle’s guide to polyamory.
Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba basks in the pulp aesthetic. A saree-clad woman drenches in the night showers as a man admires her; the same man smiles for a little too long as the woman sits opposite him on a boat, in the middle of a river lurking with crocs. But it all feels merely an exercise in style, since the mystery itself unties rather easily. This time, Taapsee Pannu seems ill-at-ease in the role of Rani. She is lukewarm in expressing the sultriness of a femme fatale. Vikrant Massey, an otherwise convincing actor, has nothing to chew on. Sunny Kaushal’s turn from simp to psycho can be seen from miles away, but he has a wicked streak that is engaging. Jimmy Shergill, on the other hand, plays a cop who is either too involved or absent from the case. There is no middle.
Like in the previous film, the twisted ones in Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba take lessons on love, life and murder from the fictional author Dinesh Pandit. I sighed every time a character begins, “Panditji kehte hain...(Panditji says).” The only instance I got up from my chair was when a character slowly walks in as Taapsee’s voiceover gives a biographical account of the pulp author. “Thirty years ago, he was insulted and fired from a police station. Since then, he is taking revenge against cops through his stories,” she says. Sadly, the character wasn’t Dinesh. But what if? A murder in a murder mystery by a murder mystery novelist. Now that would be something.
Movie: Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba
Director: Jayprad Desai
Cast: Taapsee Pannu, Sunny Kaushal, Vikrant Massey, Jimmy Shergill
Streamer: Netflix
Rating : 2.5/5
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