'Love Hostel' review: Sensitive subject, bold effort but too much violence mars the impact

Shankar Raman’s new Hindi film, Love Hostel, streaming on Zee 5, begins on a chilling note: an honour killing in the past and foreboding of another in the future as Jyoti Dilawar (Sanya Malhotra) elopes with Ahmed (Ashu) Shaukeen (Vikrant Massey) to get married in the court against the wishes of her family. They are both sent off to the Safe Home for a week, while Jyoti’s family, led by the politician grandmother, is out to get them. Difference in religion (she a Hindu, he a Muslim) meets a yawning gap in status (she a CA, he the son of a meat seller) to become an alliance made for Khap Panchayat’s hatred.

Cinematographer-turned-filmmaker Shanker Raman continues with the thriller/noir mode that he had dabbled with in his debut Gurgaon. Just like the former there is an intricate palette of characters, twists and turns, secret connections and revelations that keep the plot moving. The setting is also similar—the wastelands of Haryana with the dark heart of a family becoming the conflict ground. Be it the Dadi or Jyoti’s younger brother or Dagar (Bobby Deol), a self-proclaimed guardian of the society, out to save it from the supposedly “illicit” bhagauda (runaway) alliances, each of them is obscurantist, intractable, brutal to a fault and irredeemably evil. They are the highlights of the larger pervasive picture of patriarchy—in the world of the cops, politicians and businessmen, besides the family; where male entitlement is at the very lowest depths and women have no choice but to let their destiny be in their hands or become patriarchal themselves.

It's admirable how Raman configures the Muslim identity issues in this already toxic landscape. How Muslims are forced to conceal their true selves, how they are deliberately implicated in crimes and guns and weapons planted in their homes to mark them as terrorists—seedhe saade kasai ko aatankwadi bana diya (a simple butcher has been turned into a terrorist), says Ashu of his own dad. Or when he talks about how Muslims are perennially looked at with suspicion in the society—they may make a pair of shoes with their own skin but will be accused of using cowhide. There’s the utter exhaustion of taking one step forward in life only to be forced to go back two. This is no dignified place to be a Muslim.

Amid this there are counter currents of love and solidarity, in the community feeling of the Safe Room and in the way one couple goes all out to help another in need. Little pockets of sunshine which get clouded over in the blink of an eye as one bloody shootout follows another. Apathetic, anesthetized, hardened and uncontrollable Dagar straddles the screen all poker-faced, moving from one spot to another, indiscriminately killing people. Like the bullets that he lets loose from his gun, he is himself cruelty unleashed.

Beyond a point this automated blood and gore and robotic violence begins to feel like an indulgence than a necessity. Instead of underscoring the horror of the situation, the filmmaking becomes all about revelling in it visually. Instead of my dismay and repugnance against the inhumanity and monstrosity getting fuelled at each step, I found myself getting benumbed and desensitized if not turning an out and out voyeur. In the violent excesses, it got difficult to find room to pause, assimilate and reflect.

Add to it the backstory of Dagar that felt like an explanation (complete with dog that brings out the hangdog look on his face), if not a justification for his indefensible, malevolent ways and the film derails from being one about societal injustice to becoming just another revenge and retribution saga. In that sense, I had the same issue with Love Hostel that I did with Vetri Maaran’s Oor Eravu (That Night) segment in the Tamil anthology series Paava Kadhaigal. It makes the perpetrator of violence the protagonist what with Deol, with his vacuous-pretending-to-be impenetrable look, taking the attention away from Jyoti and Ashu whose story it should have remained from the first frame to the last. It’s worse because Jyoti is a rare woman with agency, unstoppable but stopped on her tracks.

An issue like honour killing is powerful and poignant enough to resonate on its own. The impact of just one last scene in Sairat refuses to get erased from the mind. Before that there was the Superhit Pyaar segment in Dibakar Banerjee’s Love Sex Aur Dhoka aka LSD. More than a sensitive and sensitizing film, Love Hostel felt like a ride through a torture chamber, in which I came out with little empathy but my stomach churning and my mind wondering about the number of people Dagar eventually killed.