The clock’s ticking for Satya (Alia Bhatt) in Vasan Bala’s ‘Jigra’. Her brother Ankur (Vedang Raina) is on death row in an island nation called Hanshi Dao (a fictitious version of Singapore), and she’s just gotten news that the date of his execution has been expedited for an attempted jailbreak.

What was supposed to happen in a few weeks will now happen in a few days. We see her face computing all possible ploys as fast as she can, and then deciding on a action plan. It won’t be pretty, an accomplice warns, but she’s already decided. The accomplice backs out, telling Satya she’ll be alone. “I never said I was a hero. I’ll understand if you don’t wish to join me,” she says, “but don’t get in my way.”

Vasan Bala’s films have often been rooted in their affection for pop culture, but his reinvention of Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘angry young man’ through a petite-looking Bhatt is among his biggest successes in his brief career. Bhatt plays Satya, a human form of a sledge hammer: lean, no wasted movement, striking with purpose.

She’s surrounded by burly-looking men with guns, experience, wisdom–but none of them have her focus, endurance, and courage (translating to Jigra) to make decisions that look impulsive, but always seem to pan out in the end. The wordplay in the title for Bala’s film also means ‘sweetheart’—how Satya sees Ankur.

Orphaned at a young age, after they saw their father kill himself, Satya has been both a parent and an elder sibling to Ankur. They live with a distant relative in Delhi’s Maharani Bagh locality, where they’re constantly reminded of their identity as strangers in the house–especially in the formal manner that the relatives keep telling them they’re ‘part of the family’.

Both Satya and Ankur know those words are less sincere than a politician’s. Bala and co-writer Debashish Irengbam manage to set up Satya and Ankur’s loneliness in a brisk opening 20 minutes.

In Hanshi Dao, where Ankur and his rich cousin Kabir (Aditya Nanda) are working on a software venture, the two boys get pulled over for speeding. Kabir, found to be carrying drugs, implicates them both. Kabir’s parents send in the ‘family lawyer’, who manipulates his way to let Ankur take the fall for the confiscated drugs. Kabir walks free, while Ankur is sentenced to death.

Bala’s film is a reworking of another Dharma film called ‘Gumrah’ (1993), starring Sridevi and Sanjay Dutt, directed by Mahesh Bhatt. The 1993 film was itself inspired from an Australian TV series called Bangkok Hilton, starring a young Nicole Kidman.

While the Mahesh Bhatt version was a lean thriller for its time, his daughter’s version is exponentially snazzier. After Ankur’s sentencing, Jigra becomes a razor-sharp prison thriller.

Seeing Satya’s unruliness in a terrific scene with ill-mannered youngsters, Bhatia immediately takes a liking to her. Muthu, a former cop, who caused an innocent boy to get a death sentence, is now desperately trying to get him released. Taking on a rigged, apathetic system, both Satya and Bhatia are prepared to step outside the codes of decency, and break the boys out. Muthu takes some convincing, but he eventually joins them too.

‘Jigra’ is a Alia Bhatt showcase, and Bala gives her all the muscle to cement her place among the finest in Hindi cinema. There’s a sensational scene where she asks a prison guard if she looks sad? Yes, she does. Then we see Bhatt trying to fake a sense of calm and poise in real time, something that betrays her spontaneous style. It’s a mini-masterclass in acting.

Bala doesn’t make any bones about his influences, liberally name-dropping Bachchan in a dialogue and using songs from ‘Zanjeer’ (1973) in scenes, including Yaari Hai Imaan Mera during a sequence that made me smile. He also has his share of fun with inmates being named Wong Kar-wai, Kim Ki-duk. Even Gomber’s character’s name seems to be an ode to Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds (2009).

‘Jigra’ loses some of its momentum towards the end, when amid all the bullets and fury, most principal characters escape relatively unscathed. Bala and Irengbam have a track about a separatist movement and ‘political prisoners’ (fully fictional, mind you, and in no way resembling anything in India) that doesn’t go anywhere.

A character’s death–while necessary for Satya’s arc as an imperfect protagonist–is clumsily staged. Also, for a film that is so meticulously designed, there are a few glaring contrivances towards the end of the film, where the fleeing characters comfortably navigate their way to a boat.

I kept thinking of Nagraj Manjule’s far-from-perfect ‘Jhund’ (2022)–which hinges its entire climax on a character getting past a security check at the airport. While Bala’s characters crossover into international waters without any hesitation. Jigra might have begun as a Vasan Bala film, but it surely ends as a Dharma Productions film–packing in the catharsis. It’s not enough to soil the whole experience, but one hopes that Bala will use this step forward to be even more fine-tuned and uncompromising in his future projects.

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