Every character in "Ugly" is...well
Star Cast : Ronit Roy, Rahul Bhat, Tejaswini Kolhapure, Vineet Kumar Singh, Surveen Chawla, Siddhanth Kapoor, Anshika Shrivastava, Girish Kulkarni,
Banner : Phantom Films, Dar Motion Pictures
Producer : Madhu Mantena, Vikas Bahl, Vikramaditya Motwane, Arun Rangachari, Vivek Rangachari,
Story Writer : Anurag Kashyap
Music Director : G.V Prakash Kumar
Lyricst : Gaurav Solanki.
Playback Singer : G.V Prakash Kumar, Shilpa Rao, Barkha Swaroop Saxena, Christopher Stanley.
Review : Unexpectedness is a given in Anurag Kashyap's world of the dreadful and the damned. "Ugly", his most sensitive film to date, comparable with perhaps "That Girl In Yellow Boots", begins with Tejaswini Kolhapure making a stunning comeback after years of uncertainty, contemplating death.
Every character in "Ugly" is...well, ugly. Do not look for redemptive escape routes in this film. Moving radically away from last week's all-is-well-in-the-world premise in "PK", "Ugly" tells us what William Shakespeare did centuries ago. Human nature, by its very nature, is rotten and to the core. You cannot escape your basic nature of self-serving greed.
Everyone in "Ugly" craves for something more than what he or she has in life. It may not be a better life, but there is a hankering for escape. Hence, the aforementioned wife Shalini (Tejaswini) trapped in a loveless marriage to a policeman, who is not unkind, simply insensitive to her needs, reveals an ugly side to her personality with a suddenness that leaves us repelled.
Fathers, mothers, friends and lovers were never meant to behave the way they do in Kashyap's kingdom of the doomed and the damned. The camera (Nikos Andritsakis) looks on with brazen brutality at the below-the-belt antics of an inebriated unbalanced mother (Tejaswini Kolhapure), her policeman-husband (Ronit Roy, sturdy and sinister), her former husband (Rahul Bhat, immersed in angst) and his best friend (the natural-born scene-stealer Vineet Kumar Singh).
Wait. There are others. Like Kashyap's other parable of perverse times, the plot is glutted with characters, each played with such astute unassumingness that they had to be cast by a master caster, certainly not Chaitanya (Vineet Kumar), the self-employed casting director in "Ugly" who, like others characters, plays his own games of avaricious one-upmanship when a 10-year girl disappears from her father's car in a crowded street of Mumbai.
It would be criminal to reveal more of the plot. Suffice it is to say the film requires immense concentration from us. It's not just the writers who have toiled on the nuances. It's the actors who bring to every scene a certain unrehearsed turmoil.
Towards the start of the cat-and-mouse chase to the 'fiendish' line, there is a very lengthy scene where Rahul and Chaitanya, frantic with worry after the former's daughter disappears, try to patiently explain to the policeman on duty the bizarre chain of events that have transpired.
