Taapsee Pannu and Vikrant Massey as Jwalapur’s murderous man and wife now on the run from the police, are back, riding on a script by returning screenwriter Kanika Dhillon and in the company of a new director, Jayprad Desai (Kaun Pravin Tambe?). The enterprise may not be instantly felicitous but it definitely isn’t pointless either.
Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba juggles with entanglements that are similar to the ones that we encountered in Haseen Dillruba. Mercifully, they do not come off as overly cliched thanks in the main to the lead pair who get into the swing of things with the all the vigour and conviction at their command.
Playing out in bustling Agra, the town Rani and Rishu have retreated to in order to evade detection by the police, Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba is, in essence, ‘more’ of the same, often in a very literal sense. The risk that the wanted couple faces of being nabbed and brought to book is daunting. It forces them to resort to desperate measures that only make things worse.
The denouement of the Netflix crime drama Haseen Dillruba had sprung from a single book by the fictional high priest of pulp Dinesh Pandit, a writer Rani swears by. The sequel falls back for ‘inspiration’ not on one but two mystery novels by the same author.
The books take their titles from deadly reptiles – crocodiles and cobras. But these dangerous creatures are not the only predators around. The beatific and wily Rani, when she has her back to the wall, can hiss, attack and bite and be as venomous as any serpent. Rani loves the colour read – even her umbrella is crimson – but she is aware that it spells danger. She acknowledges that it is the colour of ishq, but knows that it symbolises anger and jealousy too. Passion, rage, envy and subterfuge are all in the mix that the crime drama serves up.
Since this is Agra, ‘Taj’ is inevitably ever-present. Rani’s beauty parlour is named Mumtaj (and not Mumtaz) and a lodge that briefly serves as a hideout for one of the key characters is located in a neighbourhood called Tajgaon.
And the Yamuna, now crocodile-infested after a barrage burst, runs through the city and, like the river that flowed behind Rishu Saxena’s Jwalapur home, becomes a principal site for the film’s life-and-death climax.
The Agra police, led by DSP Mrityunjay Paswan (Jimmy Shergill), are on Rani and Rishu’s trail. The Taj Mahal looms in the background in many a scene but Shah Jahan’s timeless monument of love isn’t what Rani has in mind when she puts in motion another devious escape plan.
Survival and safety are of paramount importance and Rani will do whatever it takes to claw her way out of the deep hole that she and her embattled husband are in.
Rishu, who sports an artificial left arm, teaches at a coaching centre under an assumed identity and struggles to keep the unwanted advances of his landlady Poonam (Bhumika Dube) at bay, hopes to flee to Thailand with Rani. His plans are thwarted by a DSP on a self-avowed personal mission.
Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba tiptoes through a minefield of mind games that Rishu and Rani play with Abhimanyu (Sunny Kaushal), a painfully self-effacing compounder who works at a doctor’s clinic and knows a fair bit about potions and poisons. He has a massive crush on Rani but is unable to go beyond tentative movie dates with her at a single-screen theatre until the lady decides that it is imperative to go further than that.
Rishu counsels caution but Rani will have none of it. She leads Abhimanyu on for she needs his help to outthink the cops and make her way out of trouble. In the process, Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba assembles a slew of macabre conspiracies, the sleuthing of two determined investigators who believe they know what is going on, a triangle that snowballs into a crisis, and a higher body count on and off the screen. But the film delivers a far less explosive and gruesome finale than Haseen Dillruba did.
A book-within-a-film format had given the 2021 release its spine for whatever it was worth. However, the references that were strewn across the film to a specific Dinesh Pandit novel did not fully imprint themselves on the proceedings until the hurly-burly had been done and Rani was hauled over the coals on suspicion of having murdered her husband.
She was, of course, let off for want of conclusive evidence but the needle of suspicion never veered away from her, especially after Inspector Kishore Rawat (Aditya Srivastava, who reprises his role here but with considerably reduced leeway) stumbled upon a Dinesh Pandit novel that had clues hiding in plain sight on its pages. The book helped the tenacious cop wrap his head around the daring obfuscation that Rani and her presumed-to-be-dead husband had pulled off.
By the end of the first film, a chain of events – a loveless marriage, an extra-marital fling, a sudden ignition of passion between the incompatible couple, a killer blow on the back of an intruder’s head, a gas cylinder explosion and the chopping of an arm – had turned Rani and Rishu into fugitives from the law.
Neither the addition of Sunny Kaushal and Jimmy Shergill to the cast nor the predatory creatures that are alluded to enhance the sting in the film’s tail. But, for sure, the love story is more twisted than before. A kiss in Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba does not seal a deal. It only buys time for those that are fast running out of it.
Consequently, matters turn hotter for the absconders but Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba is, in the ultimate analysis, more cat-and-mouse than cobras and crocodiles. Indications in the film’s final moments in a north Indian hill town are clear enough – the story is far from over. But are we ready for more? Yes, if Taapsee Pannu keeps propelling this female-led genre exercise with the same gusto.
