TRAPPED (U/A)
Director: Vikramaditya Motwane
Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Geetanjali Thapa
Running time: 103 minutes
If you have lived in an apartment where you have the only pair of keys, chances are you’ve often dreaded that moment when the door will close behind you and those keys will be left inside. It’s one of those nagging “what if” feelings that often creeps up and gives you the chills. There’s even a very funny YouTube video of a guy getting locked out of his hotel room with not a single piece of clothing on his body.
Trapped reverses the situation. The key hangs outside and the man is locked inside the apartment with the main door latch broken. It’s more than 30 floors above the ground in a new building where there are absolutely no other residents and his screams die way before they can reach the short-of-hearing watchman lazing below. There’s no electricity to charge his cell phone and like a lot of strugglers trying to make it on their own in Mumbai, there’s really nobody to come looking for you if you suddenly go missing for a while.
After that brilliant debut with Udaan and that painting of a second film called Lootera, Vikramaditya Motwane now boards the survivor genre, which is new for Hindi cinema, but has more than a few modern-day classics in the West, like Cast Away, 127 Hours, Buried, Life of Pi and The Revenant. Most of the time it’s man against Nature, but here Nature actually helps Shaurya (Rajkummar Rao) when the heavens open up one night and after having to suck on geysers and pipes and even sip his own piss, he finally has water to drink.
No, it’s not an easy film to watch. How can it be when the second-most important character is that of a mouse? The cheeky little rodent is the Wilson of the piece (remember the volleyball with a face in Cast Away?), a device that allows Shaurya to talk out loud. Add to that him gobbling up creepy crawlies for protein shots or killing pigeons for some late-night spit roast and Trapped is not really your Badri brand of entertainment.
But the film does keep you engaged. Largely. And that is because of the astonishing Rajkummar Rao show. From the time that door gets locked, he lets you inside his head and every little thing he tries from there on — with fire and blood, TV and toothpaste — you are engrossed and rooting for him. It’s a perfect mix of a physical and yet deeply felt performance, fearless yet freaky.
Perhaps Motwane and his writers (Amit Joshi and Hardik Mehta) could have given Rajkummar a little more to play with. There is that one Darwinian hallucination but a backstory outlining why Shaurya is who he is could have spelt his choices in that apartment clearer. Also the little prologue romance with Noorie (the luminous Geetanjali Thapa) is a tad too convenient an excuse for the hurried hunting of the apartment.
Besides Rajkummar, the other big heroes of the film are cinematographer Siddharth Diwan, largely shooting the film hand-held and without artificial lights, giving the audience that locked-in feeling, sound designer Anish John, who after Labour of Love again creates a new world purely through sound, and Alokananda Dasgupta, whose background music score takes you through the protagonist’s highs and lows effectively.
This film is not for everyone. It’s not your popcorn-and-cola weekend evening movie. Watching a man being forced to lead the life of a prehistoric caveman in one of the most modern cities of the world in 2017 can be both cathartic and nauseating at the same time. But there is that unbelievable performance at the centre of the film, which is reason enough to get trapped with Rajkummar Rao. And that mouse.
Pratim D. Gupta
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