Yakeen
Synopsis:
Halfway through Yakeen, Arjun Rampal's character is standing in the middle of this totally weirdly decorated living room that has way too many throw pillows and a lampshade that looks like it's made out of actual dried leaves, and he's just staring intently at a half-eaten plate of what looks like club sandwiches while screaming at his phone about how nothing makes any sense anymore. But to understand why he's losing his mind in this aggressively beige room, you have to look at how this whole messy thriller started, which brings us back to the beginning where he plays this successful businessman who has a seemingly great life with his gorgeous wife, played by Priyanka Chopra, and they're just living the high life in typical stylish fashion that you usually see in slick hindi movies from that era. They have a kid, they have nice cars, and everything is pristine until he gets into a terrible car crash that somehow leaves him with partial amnesia, which is a classic trope if you watch a lot of bollywood movies, and honestly, the film doesn't waste any time getting right into the psychological paranoia once he gets out of the hospital. Right after that, he starts seeing hallucinations or maybe they're real memories, who even knows at that exact second, and he can't trust his own brain because things are just constantly shifting around him.
So then he meets Kim Sharma's character in this completely random scene at a neon-lit nightclub where nobody is actually dancing to the music and everyone is just holding cocktails and staring blankly into space while wearing clothes that probably cost more than my entire laptop setup, and she's wearing this sparkly silver halter top that looks wildly uncomfortable and has about twenty tiny little dangling metallic discs that jingle every time she takes a breath or leans across the tiny glass table to deliver some vaguely threatening dialogue about how the past never really stays buried. She drops the line you can't change what's already been written right into his face with this smirk that lasts for an awkwardly long time before she just walks away into the crowd of people who are still standing completely still, and he's left standing there holding a warm club soda. Anyway, he starts digging into his own past because he thinks his wife is hiding a massive secret from him, and he finds out that he wasn't even driving the car during the crash, and then the movie rushes through a whole bunch of boardroom meetings, shadowy phone calls, secret envelope exchanges, and mysterious background checks in literally thirty seconds so we can get back to the psychological freak-outs.
The paranoia just keeps ramping up and he's following people down dimly lit alleyways and peering through frosted glass windows while dramatic synth music swells up on the soundtrack, because that's just how romantic thrillers and suspense dramas rolled back then in the broader world of bollywood. It turns out his wife had a whole other life before the marriage involving a dark secret and a shady past lover who wants revenge, and the plot gets so convoluted with fake identities and hidden motives that you kind of stop trying to figure out the logistics and just watch Priyanka Chopra look impossibly glamorous while crying dramatic tears in slow motion. The twists keep piling up until everything explodes in a chaotic confrontation at a cliffside cabin where someone pulls out a gun and bullets start flying everywhere, shattering windows and lamps and those decorative pillows from earlier. Arjun tackles the bad guy through a wooden railing, they tumble down the slope into the dirt, and he grabs a heavy rock to finish the fight.
There is a specific kind of shoulder twitch Arjun Rampal does in the first twenty minutes of Yakeen that tells you everything you need to know about the movie's relationship with its source material, a French thriller called L'Appartement that already had a much slicker Hollywood do-over in Wicker Park. He plays a wealthy, successful corporate honcho whose life is supposedly falling apart after an accident, but mostly he just looks like he's trying to remember if he left his iron on at home. Look, it's a small thing, but it bugged me from the jump. Hindi thrillers of the mid-two-thousands had a weird relationship with sleekness, always trying to dress up like European imports while still insisting on dragging in songs that felt like interruptions from a totally different alternate universe.
Girish Dhamija directs this mess with the frantic energy of someone who just discovered what a Dutch angle is and decided to use it every time two people have a conversation about groceries. The screenplay is a series of contrivances stacked so high they practically tumble over whenever a character walks into a room. You get these sprawling, neon-drenched night scenes where nobody ever seems to work a real job, just brooding in expansive glass apartments overlooking Mumbai while cell phones ring incessantly with mysterious tones. It's the kind of glossy visual presentation that hides an absolute vacuum where the logic should be. Characters wander into abandoned warehouses at midnight without a flashlight because the plot demands they be startled by a shadow.
Priyanka Chopra is working overtime here, playing the obsessive, wounded woman who won't let go of the past, and she manages to ground scenes that have no business working on paper. Her eyes do a lot of heavy lifting when the dialogue gets too bogged down in exposition about amnesia and mistaken identities and secret rendezvous. She brings a genuine, messy desperation to a role that could have easily slipped into camp, hitting those emotional notes with a raw intensity that leaves everyone else in the frame looking a bit sleepy. Kim Sharma shows up too, doing what she can with a part that mostly requires her to stare dramatically out of car windows and wear oversized sunglasses inside dimly lit hotel lobbies.
The cinematography leans hard into heavy blues and over-saturated yellows, giving the whole affair the distinct look of a high-end perfume commercial that forgot it had a murder plot to resolve. Every time the camera tracks around Arjun Rampal's face in slow motion, you can almost hear the editor breathing a sigh of relief because they didn't have to cut on action. Then there's the soundtrack, featuring a recurring piano motif that pops up so often during dramatic reveals it starts to feel like a personal threat. It repeats three or four times within a single fifteen-minute stretch whenever someone opens a drawer or looks at a photograph with a furrowed brow.
Watching these Hindi films from that particular decade often feels like watching an industry trying to shed its old skin while keeping the heavy boots on. Yakeen wants to be a psychological puzzle in the vein of a De Palma picture, but it lacks the necessary cruelty and precision to make the twists land with any real force. The themes of trust and paranoia are broad brushstrokes painted over a standard melodrama about jealousy and revenge. You can spot the villain twenty minutes before the intermission because they are the only person on screen who doesn't have a moody backlighting setup trailing behind their left shoulder.
There's an awkward dubbing moment during a street confrontation where the audio sync is off by a full half-second, and the boom mic dips into the top of the frame just enough to catch your eye if you're not paying attention to the dialogue. These little technical glitches accumulate over two hours until the viewing experience feels less like sitting through a compelling mystery and more like watching someone assemble flat-pack furniture without the instructions. Arjun Rampal delivers his final confrontation lines with the flat affect of a man reading a grocery list off his palm. The whole thing just sputters out with a whimper rather than a bang, leaving you to stare at the credits wondering why nobody thought to check the logic of the third act before yelling wrap.