Guilty

This movie asks some very important questions about consent, the "internet conviction" of both the perpetrator and the victim, and the social inequality that exists between what a man can do and what a woman can.

The movie is packed with good performances and impressive direction. But despite all of this, the movie is flawed by its pace where the first half is at times painful to watch with the characters just having random interactions which don't seem to move the plot forward in any way.

Overall, I would still recommend this movie if you are ready to reflect upon the society, the people around you and yourself..

This film would have been a great one if they actually went full on with what it was doing but sadly we just get a shallow film that feels like it was only made for people in Bollywood and literally no one else on Earth. And Kiara Advani was fine. But you realize how lucky Kanika was to have worked with seasoned actors like Kangana & Taapsee in the past to cover up her writing lapses, here it becomes more apparent how ordinary it becomes after a while.

Guilty is one of the new Netflix line ups for this year. And to a certain extent this is the most "well-made" of all of them.

The premise is intriguing and the way the story is laid out (at least initially), seemed to be really exciting. But the film somewhere lacks few things which (if there) could have made it into a masterpiece. It had all the great ingredients but somehow the execution falters.

Having said that, Advani's performance is a breath of fresh air. And the senior casts also shine. On top of that, few of the newcomers have actually done more than just being the "pretty new faces".

Moving back to the problems of this film (and boy there are many). First of all (on a lighter note) the number of times the word "MeToo" has been uttered in the film is actually kind of, little bit annoying (apologies in advance). I mean I get it, you are making a film and want to address the movement but I am sure there are more proper ways of doing it than just literally addressing the word in every third dialogue. Plus the story is so incoherent. I mean the film starts off by showing this lawyer (cum-Sherlock) investigating the truth and yet by the time film reaches second half does nothing actually to discover anything, apart from listening tapes and looking at Kiara. Even Kiara's character which is crafted as a nuanced, conflicted character but in the end comes across as one quintessential "Abla" Bollywood heroine. (To be fair, I didn't saw that coming at all). This film wants to be so many things, that after a point one would surely wonder which way the film is gonna go (which could be a good thing).

This film is not certainly bad. But the second half could have been more impactful. I get it, its a Bollywood film and the only way to make the message come across to the audience is by adding plenty of drama and insane amount of glycerin maybe. But I guess this film could have added one more word apart from MeToo and that is subtlety. I wish the film approached this great concept with more delicacy and grace. It could have been a perfect film like Pink maybe or Netflix's Unbelievable, but in the end this film is just Guilty... of adapting to all the classic Bollywood cliches. (You see what I did there)

Go ahead and watch. You might love it though.

The plot revolves a rape case filed by the victim under MeToo circumstances. But the characters were loosely designed and I actually thought Kiara's character is suffering from psychopathic disease with the back-to-back cuts. They somehow made it convincing at the end with a long list of dialogues and epilogue. But there are lot of gaps in the story only to make it disengaging. A good one time watch in Netflix!!

It's a good movie and captures different attitudes and aspects of college and society in relation to respecting women.