Alia Bhatt in ‘Jigra’

Movies can shape us in silly but significant ways. Growing up in the 1990s, for instance, I developed an irrational and premature fear of foreign travel. This had little to do with any growing awareness of geopolitical realities and everything to do with a schlocky Bollywood film starring Sridevi and Sanjay Dutt. Directed by Mahesh Bhatt, Gumrah (1993) — a jailbreak drama set between Mumbai and Hong Kong — was shivery B-movie fun, and it left me with an enduring anxiety. If I clutched my cabin luggage a little too cautiously on my first international flight, nervously looking over my shoulders, I had Bhatt and the duplicitous face of Rahul Roy to thank.

I doubt Vasan Bala’s Jigra, a modern reskin of Gumrah, also produced by Dharma Productions and featuring Bhatt’s daughter Alia in the lead role, will have the same effect on the current generation of movie-goers. Despite its sheen of competence, it lacks the spine-chilling impact of great arrested-abroad films, like Alan Parker’s frequently racist yet effective Midnight Express (1978). (On that note, in an era of travel influencers and affordable itineraries, not to mention a glut of true-crime documentaries and podcasts on the perils of globetrotting, are fictional narratives losing their cautionary force?)

Alia plays Satya, an orphan consumed by the care and guardianship of her younger brother after their father’s suicide. They grow up on the charity of a distant uncle; Bala is uncommonly adept at fleshing out transactional human relationships, as evidenced by his last two features, Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota and Monica, O My Darling. When tech nerd Ankur (Vedang Raina), away on his first business trip, is wrongfully incarcerated in the fictitious east-Asian country of Hanshi Dao, Satya boards a charter plane to bail him out. Her hopes are dashed on arrival: the law of the land is clear on suspected drug offenders like Ankur — death by electrocution.

Jigra is a ‘jailbreak’ flick, though the word is uttered only an hour into the story. With time fast running out for Ankur, and no legal or diplomatic recourse in sight, Satya teams up with Bhatia (Manoj Pahwa), a retired gangster and a father, and Muthu (Rahul Ravindran), an ex-cop seeking redemption. The compound they seek to infiltrate is a high-security prison situation on an island. “It’s complicated, unlike a masala movie,” Bhatia says, an odd sentiment to be aired in a Vasan Bala movie, the most nostalgic and accepting of the cinephile directors.

Indeed, to watch a Vasan Bala film is to be constantly reminded, with a mix of affection and cheek, of other movies. Satya is a spin on Amitabh Bachchan’s angsty orphan archetype; a flashback early on namechecks Ranjeet, Amreesh and Jeevan, the golden trio of Bachchan-era villains. In Bala’s mind, the borders of cinema are eternally porous: the eccentric prison warden of Indian origin, rendered by Vivek Gomber in surreal Singlish, is called Hans Raj Landa. One can go on spotting references in this vein (Kim Ki-duk, Red Apple cigarettes easter egg), but a doubt emerges: is Bala’s style always in sync with the emotional momentum of his tale, as it was in his earlier work, or is it beginning to smack of film geek juvenilia?

Alia Bhatt makes quick, reassuring work of Satya. She plays the character as tremulous and unpredictable, like a bottle rocket tipped at a precarious angle on an alien street. Comparisons have been made, not unfairly, between the obsessive familial bonds tying Jigra with Sandeep Reddy’s Animal (2023). However, Bala is too sweet-natured a director to go the distance with Satya; a scene where she proposes self-harm as a bargaining gambit, and then is persuaded off the idea by wiser minds, encapsulates this split conviction. Vedang Raina, who stood out as the shiny-haired Reggie in The Archies, is engaging and often affecting as Ankur. Nevertheless, I wish the film was narrated entirely from Satya’s perspective, instead of cutting back and forth between the two crews, one inside the prison, one out, each working confusingly overlapping plans, muddling the effect.

Despite the later refrain of “I got the fire”, Jigra does not hit reaction mass. The obstacle course of ambushes, infiltrations and escapes in the home stretch feels improbable and overblown. It’s a conventionally chaotic climax for a film that thrives in its moments of quiet poetry: Satya asleep on a harbour bench, swaddled in the blue-grey of dawn; basketball as a motif of sibling affection; a whole life story summarized in the slow hours of a restaurant, without any background score. When Bala returns with his next feature, it’s this aspect of his talent he would do well to further actualize.

Jigra is currently running in theatres