Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor, Vivek Oberoi, Om Puri, Dia Mirza, Kirron Kher

Director: Rensil D’ Silva

Rating:***

A newly-married couple relocates from New Delhi to New York, and discovers there is more to their academically-inclined life—driving off from their suburban home every morning to teach, and coming back in the evening with groceries--- than meets the eye. In the house across lives a closed group of people, and everything starts to unravel rapidly when one of them, a desperate young woman in a ‘hijaab’, shows up at their doorstep, scared for her life.

As Avantika (Kareena Kapoor) and Ehsaan (Saif Ali Khan) get sucked into a never-ending spiral of fear and intrigue and terror, ‘Kurbaan’ stays on-track in its resolve to tell a story of substance. Written sharply by producer Karan Johar, and directed intelligently by first-timer Rensil D’Silva, the film enunciates, with admirable clarity, contemporary conundrums: of beliefs and religious identity and differing points of view, of being Muslim and wondering where the term ‘moderate’ fits in, of being human and feeling hurt and living by the sword. Or bombs, as the case might be.

I went to see ‘Kurbaan’ with some trepidation, not knowing how these elements, done to death in a certain kind of ‘realistic’ Hollywood film, and used, badly, in this year’s ‘New York’, would pan out. I’m happy to report that it raises the near-defunct issue-based cinema in Bollywood to the next level. There is no unnecessary song-and-dance, or stiltedness and preaching.

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