Movie Review - Pyscho Raman (Raman Raghvan 2.0)

Pyscho Raman (Raman Raghvan 2.0)

*************** Spoilers Ahead ***********************************************

We recently watched Anurag Kashyap’s dark noir style movie based on the 1969 serial killer Raman Raghvan, on Amazon Prime, and the haunting scenes from the movie stayed with me for a while (did I mention it was dark).

This 2016 movie is the directors take on mental health issues, clinical as well as circumstantial and societal and though the narrator is gruesome and quite morbid, what stands out is the performance of the two central characters in the movie Ramanna (Nawaz Siddiqui), a schizophrenic bottom feeder who believes that God is instructing him to decree who lives and who dies and Raghvan (Vicky Kaushal), the cop, who is trying to apprehend this copycat killer, who has been terrorizing the slums in Mumbai by bludgeon the slum dwellers in their sleep. The cop played brilliantly by Vicky Kaushal, is a coke head, who straddles the murky world between black and white and will go to any lengths to nab his psycho serial killer. He’s has a live-in girlfriend, who he treats like a doormat and abuses her when he’s high on cocaine and when’s he’s suffering from coke infused insomnia. Nawaz, as usual, is brilliant and rises above the script playing the deranged Ramanna. In every frame where he’s present, he’s wound up like a feral cat, and you cannot quite predict what he could do next. Nawaz struts around the slums with his iron rod, which he uses to pulverize his victims, that he chooses without any remorse. The best scenes are when he’s stalking them and watches them as if he’s viewing them thru the lens of the binoculars, observing their every move, the voices in his head telling him who lives and who dies.

Ramanna surrenders to the police quite early in his killing spree, but they do not take his claims seriously and he ultimately escapes, only to kill again with impunity. He imposes himself on his sister and her family, who clearly wants no part of him in their lives and terrorizes them before finally killing the entire family with his rod. The police get a wind of this and chase him in the slums, but he browbeats them to escape and carry on with the voices in his head. Nawaz is not an imposing actor, but the way he struts about, his mannerism, make him larger than life, almost giving him a diabolical satanic presence. Raghvan, the cop, has enormous baggage of his own, which he’s carried since his childhood and it spills into the way he leads his life. Nawaz’s portrayal of a psycho serial killer is the best that I’ve watched, sans some towering performances by Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, and the ilk.

Watch this gruesome tale of the deranged. And the depraved if you are into the dark kinda movies. Else there’s always the ‘Sound of Music’ or ‘The Kind and I’.

IMDB Link