*SPOILER ALERT*
The movie starts with a masked man experimenting with rats. He drops a glass tablet inside a cage and as soon as it crashes, a poisonous gas spreads through the cage killing all the rats. The scene shifts to a man (Abir Chatterjee) boarding a crowded Kolkata metro while talking on a phone. He is looking for a bag, which presumably has some device of mass destruction. At the next station, a milk bottle crashes and poisonous gas kills all those aboard.
With this well-edited thrilling start, the story moves two years forward to a seven-months pregnant Vidya Bagchi (Vidya Balan) arriving at Kolkata from London in search of her husband, who went missing a few weeks ago. A young police inspector Rana alias Satyaki Sinha (Parambrata Chatterjee) helps her in her search, which gets them a close encounter with the street life in Kolkata.
The city is preparing for Durga pooja. Idols are being prepared, woman are dressed up in traditional white sarees with red border, the crowded streets and the street food, the dingy hotel room covered with layers of dust – all this adds to the flavour of the city.
From it being a search for Arnab Bagchi, it becomes search for Milan Domji (Indraneil Sengupta) who looks like Arnab, or perhaps is Arnab and is prime suspect for the metro attack. A R Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), second-in command at the Intelligence Bureau, who was once assigned the task to capture Damji becomes involved in the search, though initially as a detractor. It is revealed that Damji was a Bureau member, handpicked (along with a few others) by the current IB chief Bhaskaran (Dhritiman Chatterjee), to be trained as super cop. The training was undertaken by Vajpayee (Darshan Jariwala), who retired after Damji’s defection.
Khan uses Vidya to reach Damji, and admits it to her rather brashly. He tells her that she can succeed as “nobody will suspect a pregnant woman.”
Meanwhile, those protecting Damji hire Bob Biswas (Saswata Chatterjee), who works as a lousy insurance agent in the morning and a contract killer by night, to kill those who might reveal the secret. After many twists, it turns out that Bhaskaran was the mole in IB and using that information Khan, Rana and Vidya lure Damji out of hiding.
On the last day of Durga pooja, Vidya goes to Triangular Park to meet Domji, who has promised to return her husband. The park is jam-packed with people celebrating Durga pooja. Vidya meets Domji, kills him and runs away. Rana, meanwhile, figures out everything and reaches the scene. He explains to Khan that Arnab Bagchi and Vidya Bagchi are just a story, the woman (whoever she was) wanted to kill Domji and was in fact using them to reach him. Of course nobody suspected her- who would suspect a pregnant woman! She leaves evidence against Bhaskaran with them.
Post-climax it is revealed that she was wife of the IB agent (Abir), who was on the metro to stop the attack. She was pregnant but had a miscarriage shortly after learning of her husband’s demise. Vajpayee, trains her to enable her to take revenge.
The director, Sujoy Ghosh, has drawn an analogy with how Gods gave demons power and when the latter misused it, Gods created Durga. She was given powers to destroy the demons and after she purges the earth, she disappears.
As an audience one tries to speculate what comes next, but the director has played his cards well by throwing unexpected twist every time you think you know what’s gonna happen.
The movie provides an interesting array of characters. There is Bob, who is a cold-blooded killer but no athlete. He is baby-faced and always has a smile on his face. You would expect him to be a content middle-class family man, certainly not a contract killer. There is Rana, a young and smart police officer, who helps Vidya out of his sense of duty and in parts out of chivalry. Throughout the movie he tries to deal with his growing attraction and admiration towards an already married and heavily pregnant Vidya.
Then of course there is Vidya herself. At first she is a loving wife determined to find her husband come what may. At the climax she is shown to be vengeful and driven by righteous-anger. This character, poles apart from the one Balan played in ‘The Dirty Picture’, establishes Balan as a versatile actor. It is to her credit that she has pulled of the movie on her own, without any ‘hero’ per say.
Also, you would never suspect a mother with a wailing infant to be carrying poisonous gas with her (was it even her baby? Was she blackmailed into doing it?)
There were loopholes too. You cannot open a padlock with a hairpin. Right after having a near-death incident, Vidya seems pretty calm when she meets Rana and does not talk about the incident immediately. Even though she cleans after her, she has to have left fingerprints (like on the rubber stomach pad she wears to fake pregnant look) unless, she didn’t have any.
All said and done, this movie is worth a watch, though if you have read this far and haven't seen the movie, you probably shouldn’t go for it now (you were warned).
