Joram
Synopsis:
Dasu is running through a terrifyingly dark Mumbai railway station with a baby strapped to his chest and he's completely out of breath while terrified guards are literally chasing him down because he's running for his life in the middle of a chaotic night shift.
Look, if you're keeping up with modern bollywood movies, you know they usually love big shiny dance numbers and clean romantic setups, but this film is called Joram and it doesn't care about any of that glitter because it's a gritty survival thriller starring Manoj Bajpayee as a poor tribal migrant worker named Dasu who just wants to raise his baby girl in peace.
Before all this crazy running started, Dasu and his wife Vaano lived a quiet life in the deep forests of Jharkhand, which is shown in early flashbacks that establish their harsh reality living off the land, but then corporate mining companies and local politicians ruined everything by destroying their homes and displacing the entire indigenous community.
Vaano gets tragically killed in the brutal crossfire of tribal politics and corporate greed, leaving Dasu completely alone to care for his infant daughter named Joram, who is the tiny baby he has to keep tightly strapped to his body during every single terrifying second of this movie.
Dasu escapes to Mumbai and takes up a brutal job at a massive construction site, hauling heavy materials all day just to survive, and honestly, the camera spends way too much time focusing on this weirdly bright orange plastic hard hat that some random background worker keeps dropping into the muddy concrete mix, but whatever, the plot keeps moving fast anyway.
And then boom, Phaneesh, who's a ruthless local politician played by Smita Tambe, sends henchmen to hunt Dasu down because of a messy past connection involving the tribal protests back home, and she wants Dasu silenced permanently.
That brings us straight to the interval point, right when Dasu realizes he's completely unsafe in Mumbai and has to bolt through the crowded train station with baby Joram crying her lungs out while the local police and Phaneesh's goons close in from every single direction.
Right after the intermission, out of nowhere, the movie drops a random surreal song sequence where people are dancing in the red dust, which is totally bizarre since Dasu is literally hiding under a filthy train car and trying not to cough.
Dasu boards a cargo train heading back to Jharkhand because he figures his only shot at survival is escaping back to his native forest where he knows the terrain better than anyone chasing him.
Enter Ratnakar, a sympathetic police officer played by Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, who gets assigned to track Dasu down across state lines, but Ratnakar isn't just a basic villain cop because he actually starts questioning the ethics of hunting down a grieving father who's just trying to protect his kid.
Ratnakar talks to local villagers and watches dusty television news reports about the violent corporate displacement in the region, realizing that Dasu didn't commit half the crimes he's being accused of by the corrupt mining bosses.
Dasu reaches the dense, unforgiving jungles of Jharkhand on foot, exhausted, starving, and nearly delirious, while carrying little Joram who is burning up with a fever and crying endlessly through the damp undergrowth.
Other tribal rebels who remember Dasu's activism try to help him hide, but the forest is swarming with armed police squads and Phaneesh's mercenaries who are tracking their every footstep through the mud.
Ratnakar catches up to Dasu near a steep, rocky ravine just as the heavy monsoon rains start pouring down, turning the red dirt into a slippery trap where one wrong step means instant death.
Instead of shooting him, Ratnakar tries to talk Dasu down, but panic takes over and Dasu slips on the edge of the cliff while clutching Joram tightly against his chest.
Ratnakar lunges forward at the very last second and manages to grab the straps of the baby carrier, hauling a weeping Joram up to safety on the ledge just as Dasu loses his footing completely and plummets straight down into the rocky abyss below.
Ratnakar pulls the crying baby into his arms against his wet uniform jacket, staring blankly down at the dark canyon where Dasu's body has already vanished into the thick jungle fog.
The sound design in the opening ten minutes of Devashish Makhija's new picture is just relentlessly abrasive, and if I'm honest, it gave me a mild headache before I even settled into my seat. Every screech of iron on iron in the Mumbai local train feels engineered to rattle your teeth. That sonic aggression doesn't let up once the action shifts to the red dirt and dust of Jharkhand, either. It hums beneath every single frame like a live wire left loose in a puddle. You come out of the theater rubbing your ears and checking your pockets.
Manoj Bajpayee is running through a concrete corridor in the early reels with a baby strapped to his chest in a filthy, knotted cloth. He looks tired. Not movie tired where the dirt is brushed on by a makeup artist with an eye for photogenic grit, but the kind of bone-weary exhaustion that comes from sleeping on wet gravel for a week. He plays Dasru, a displaced Adivasi laborer who has drifted to the big city to haul heavy bags of construction waste for pennies. The baby is named Joram, and she has these enormous, unblinking eyes that stare past the lens into something very old and very terrifying.
Most Bollywood movies would have turned this setup into a two-hour lecture about corporate land grabs and the callousness of the urban elite, complete with a soaring background score telling you exactly when to feel bad for the poor. Makhija avoids that trap by keeping his camera stubbornly, almost cruelly close to the back of Bajpayee's neck. You see the sweat soaking through his grease-stained shirt. You watch his shoulder blades twitch under the skin every time a whistle blows in the distance. The script gives him very little dialogue, relying instead on the way his breathing changes when footsteps echo in a stairwell or a twig snaps behind a bush.
There's a secondary track involving Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub as Phaneesh, a disillusioned police officer sitting in a damp station somewhere in the hinterlands who is tasked with hunting Dasru down. Ayyub has this way of sighing before he speaks that tells you he knows he's just a cog in a machine that grinds up people he actually kind of sympathizes with. He isn't a mustache-twirling villain. He's just a guy with a knee injury and a stack of paperwork that never gets smaller. When he interrogates a local village elder, he doesn't shout or slam his fists on the table. He just looks out the window at the rain destroying the tin roof and keeps rubbing his bad knee.
The cinematography by Piyush Puty deserves a long mention because it refuses to romanticize the landscape even when the sun is setting over the hills in that golden-hour way that usually makes critics swoon. The forests look heavy and damp and indifferent to human suffering. When the characters move through the brush, the branches scratch at their faces with casual cruelty. It reminded me a bit of what Dileesh Pothan achieves in Nayattu, that same oppressive feeling that the state apparatus is a giant, unfeeling beast that will chew through anyone who happens to get caught between its teeth.
Smita Tambe shows up as Phaneesh's superior, and she has this annoying habit of chewing on a toothpick during tense scenes that clearly bothered the sound recordist because you can hear the clicking through the dialogue. It's a small thing, but once you notice it, it takes you right out of the room. Small technical lapses like that tend to pop up whenever the budget gets tight, and you can tell the production ran out of money and patience around day thirty of the shoot.
The narrative structure relies on a series of jagged flashbacks that explain why Dasru is on the run with an infant, and while some of them are gut-wrenching, a few feel redundant because Bajpayee’s face already told you everything you needed to know about the massacre in his village. The editing by Abhijeet Deshpande chops these memories into short, brutal fragments that bleed into the present day without any transitional fades. You are just suddenly in the mud twenty years ago, and then just as suddenly back in a rusted railway yard dodging guards with lathis.
Hindi cinema has a long history of ignoring rural displacement in favor of shiny romances set in London or sprawling family dramas about people who live in mansions the size of airports. When mainstream Hindi films do venture into the countryside, they usually slather everything in a layer of social message-mongering that patronizes the very people they claim to represent. Makhija doesn't do that. He treats his characters with a cold, clear-eyed respect that refuses to offer easy answers or neat emotional resolutions.
The title character, little Joram, doesn't cry nearly as much as a real baby would in those conditions, which is a minor casting miracle or a testament to some very patient off-screen wrangling by the crew. She just hangs there against Bajpayee’s chest, watching the world burn down around her with a flat, ancient stare. By the time the credits roll over a blank black screen with no swelling orchestral cue to tell you the lesson of the day, you feel like you've been dragged through a briar patch backwards. It is not an entertaining experience, exactly. It's more like an endurance test that happens to have some genuinely great acting buried in the middle of it.