VIJAY VARMA

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE RED HERRING

- Ananya Ghosh

He is usually the twist (and the ‘twisted’) in the tale. With his understated yet unnervingly realistic portrayal of psychotic characters like Anand Swarnakar in Dahaad, Hamza Shaikh in Darlings, Vijay Chauhan in Sex With Ex (Sujoy Ghosh’s segment in Lust Stories 2) the Tyagi twins in Mirzapur, and of course Sasya in She, he has created quite a niche for himself as an actor exploring different shades of ‘deranged’. But when he turns to be the ‘nice guy’, especially in a murder mystery, his recent dalliances with the dark as an actor ensures he remains the twist in the tale.

As I watched Murder Mubarak, having not read Anuja Chauhan’s 2021 crime caper Club You To Death, upon which the movie is based, I was half convinced from the get-go that his Akash ‘Kashi’ Dogra, a young lawyer, has evil intentions and I was waiting for the skeletons in his closet to eventually reveal themselves. But it was a carefully cultivated bluff devised by the maker to misdirect the audience of the murder mystery, and casting Vijay Varma as Kashi was a masterstroke—it serves as the perfect red herring in the taut thriller. This was the case even with his previous release, also a thriller, the Kareena Kapoor Khanstarrer, Jaane Jaan where he played an astute police inspector Karan Anand. But before that was his pitch-perfect act as a laidback cop who comes of age during the police procedural in the JioCinema series Kaalkoot. In fact, he stunned the audience with his range as an actor when he played two polar opposite characters — Dahaad’s charming but twisted antagonist Anand Swarnakar, and Kaalkoot’s honest cop Ravi Shankar Tripathi — with equal conviction and brilliance. The two shows dropped almost back-to-back on OTT last year.