A Thursday: Hostage drama with interesting plot twist

Hyderabad: The title of the film is bound to draw compare with Neeraj Pandey’s A Wednesday. While A Wednesday was ahead in artistic treatment, A Thursday suffers a similar celebration of anarchy. Be it the stereotypical film inspector or the ransom holding citizen, we the collective see to gulp, digest, and enjoy a general defiance to the law. Delay in failure of law is the fig leaf defense.

A Thursday is often cliched and constantly weak in its grip on the narrative. Interesting plot though. The film starts with the protagonist Naina Jaiswal (Yami Gautam) as a person running a nursery school. A day before her 30th birthday and on the day of the birthday of her fiancé Rohit (Karanvir Sharma) the drama begins.

The servant in aid and the driver of one of the students report to duty as ever. However, she holds them in captive. She then makes a public announcement that she would only spell out her terms for release of the children to Inspector Javed Khan (Atul Kulkarni).

However, ACP Catherine Alvarez (Neha Dhupia) begins to take things under her control along with her police inspector Lokhande (Sukesh Anand). While she would believe that the crises requires an aggressive response, Khan keeps Naina in conversation and engaged on the negotiating table. Among the increasing demands of Naina is a face-to-face interview with the Prime Minister Maya Rajguru (Dimple Kapadia).

To lay this plot Behzad Khambata takes about half the time. While fortunately the script doesn’t tumble over weeping children and torture, it brings in the IV Estate through Shalini Guha (Maya Sarao) whose daughter in among the captive children.

It would be playing spoilsport to state more about the story. However, you don’t have to have a high intelligent quotient to guess that the protagonist is aggressive thanks to a hidden trauma and that she has a valid reason to avenge a sleeping system. Atul Kulkarni is as sincere as he ever is. Same can be said about the ever-reliable Neha Dhupia. Dimple Kapadia has a cameo. She could surely have added some more punch to her dialogues. A tad out of touch!

The film revolves around Yami Gautam and she delivers. Her cool control sustains the script. Another thing that works for the film is its thematic push to revisit the law relating to sexual offences. The solutions, however, are tardy.

Yami Gautam keeps A Thursday moving. Given the platform on which it is launched, it’s not a bad one at all. However, Behzad Khambata even conceding the flow may have sharpened his claws in scripting the narration.

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