U Turn Movie Review: Less of a Remake, More of a Car Crash with Alaya F in Driver’s Seat

Director: Arif Khan

Writers: Pawan Kumar (Original Story), Radhika Anand, Parvez Sheikh
Cast: Alaya F, Priyanshu Painyuli, Aashim Gulati, Manu Rishi Chadda, Rajesh Sharma

Arif Khan’s U Turn is the seventh remake of Pawan Kumar’s Kannada-language U Turn (2016) in seven years, two of which are Sinhalese and Filipino productions. Which is to say the original film was not just popular but a genuine genre bender. The premise – of a journalist getting investigated for the mysterious deaths of rule-breaking motorists who take illegal u-turns on a Bangalore flyover – was a potent cocktail of social horror and supernatural drama. The storytelling wasn’t perfect, but the Lucia (2013) director’s conviction in its tropes subverted a sub-culture that thrives on shortcuts and a lack of accountability. The result: A punchy moral thriller that’s as universal as it is Asia-specific. 

But I’d be angry if I were Pawan Kumar today. The Hindi-language remake feels like the sort of mess that appears at the end of a Chinese Whispers chain. After seven translations, this U Turn is nearly unrecognizable from the original, in terms of both narrative and message. I’m all for adaptations and updates. I don’t believe in the theory that the original, by virtue of being the source material, is necessarily the best version of a story. But the problem with this ‘upgrade’ is that it’s just silly and immature. The twists make little sense. The changes are anything but an improvement. The film-making lacks curiosity and sophistication. In fact, the makers assume that we’ve watched Kumar’s 2016 film, and therefore attempt to toy with our reading of the plot rather than create something new. In doing so, the film becomes a screechy showcase of horror gimmicks, dire acting and substandard staging. 

The plot still revolves around a young journalist, Radhika (a one-note Alaya F), who’s working on a story about motorists that move the concrete divider blocks to take sneaky u-turns on a flyover. It’s not enough that she’s a spunky journalist doing her job for a local publication. There is, of course, a personal tragedy behind her ‘serious’ reporting: Her brother died in an accident triggered by those errant concrete blocks. (“Life is serious, okay,” she chastises her listicle-writing colleague). The setting is Chandigarh, though the generic filming of the city means that the setting could have been Timbuktu and it’d have made no difference to the visual language. It doesn’t help that the newspaper she works for is called Indie Times. (I imagine their rivals are called Mainstream Times). She gets her information from a homeless man who notes down the number plates of these offenders. When the cops, led by sub-inspector Sinha (Priyanshu Painyuli deserves better), detain Radhika one night, they soon realize that each of the names on her list are dying by suicide within 24 hours of breaking the rules. Cop and scribe then scramble to get to the bottom of this seemingly ghostly killing spree. 

For some reason, one genre becomes a ruse for the other here. The film tries to be oversmart by presenting itself as a supernatural thriller, only to reveal that the truth is far more ordinary (and mediocre). Usually, we see a few scenes or characters that are red herrings to outwit the viewer. Here, the entire film is a red herring. It goes to great and foolish lengths to play out in spooky designs. The deafening sound effects aside, the narrative pretends painfully hard to be a paranormal ride. 

For instance, there’s Radhika’s personal angle. Her mother casually mentions that she chats with her son’s spirit from time to time. A scene is specially inserted, where the obviously disturbed lady is seen serving dinner to an empty chair. There’s more. Some video footage shows one of the victims to be clearly possessed before killing himself. Radhika herself goes through an endless scene of terror in her apartment, where creaky doors and little-girl whispers and horny lights suggest that there’s an otherworldly presence. She also keeps hearing her dead brother’s voice calling out her name, and has a nightmare that features her waking up on the flyover with zombie-like figures. The only reason the viewer might get outwitted is because the revelation – the identity of the perpetrator – is too witless to comprehend. You can almost hear the film go “gotcha!” not to the confuddled viewer, but to itself. It’s a distinctly Zee5 issue, too, because some of the most harebrained twists in Hindi cinema have come from this platform in the last year alone. 

The sheer audacity to be this misleading is one thing; the awful execution is another. At one point in the beginning, we see a character riding his motorbike on the flyover. The staging is so poor that all the slow-moving motorists behind him look less like background figures and more like bike-gang goons dutifully following their leader in Ghulam (1998) or Josh (2000). Then there’s the introduction of Radhika as a ‘modern’ girl off the bat so that we suspect she’s complicit in this whole thing and deserves the rollercoaster journey. It’s presented like a millennial illness of sorts, where her carefree attitude to life – condoms, whisky and vodka are mentioned in the first exchange with her mother – is arguably what gets her into trouble. She smokes and speaks like the kind of character who is smoking and speaking to make a statement about how flimsy she is. When her chocolate-boy colleague (Aashim Gulati, better known as Salim from Taj: Divided by Blood) asks her if she’s ever gone steady, she replies that she’d rather chill in a friends-with-benefits-style arrangement. He then snuffs her advances for a post-date coffee, a moment that implies she needs romance and stability to be a happier woman. She watches him in admiration as he drives away, leaving her to look like a broken woman who’s asking for the horror that befalls her. Where have we heard that before?

This overselling is a classic trait of a regressive movie that’s too busy posing as a sermon on good and bad grief. In the end, however, the irony is almost too good to be true. Think about it. The film itself mirrors one of those shady offenders on the flyover – what with its illegal u-turn on tone, treatment and logic. Naturally, it dies a slow and painful death for being a bad boy.