Guilty movie review: Karan Johar and Netflix atone for past sins, Kiara Advani is a revelation
Guilty movie review: Kiara Advani, who finally gets to speak, delivers a revelatory performance. Netflix India and Karan Johar atone for their past sins and end Bollywood’s hypocrisy.
Five minutes into Guilty, Netflix’s new Indian original, there’s a MeToo joke and ten minutes later a woman is shamed. Director Ruchi Narain’s film virtually asks you to stay in the first act. It feels like an attack on woke culture, and in some scenes pretends to be an insensitive cousin of the appallingly tone-deaf and unabashedly smug Section 375.
But if you stick with it – and you should – you’ll witness the culmination of a two-year experiment. Guilty is the kind of film Netflix has been trying to perfect since it entered Bollywood: a perfect blend of Western values and desi drama. Like Kapoor & Sons, it feels like a retroactive attempt by producer Karan Johar to atone for some of his past sins, the last of which Netflix was, ahem, complicit in.
Nanki writes lyrics for a band in which her boyfriend is the lead singer. Together, Nanki and VJ inspire jealousy and admiration among the group of mostly virginal boys who swarm around them like bees. Among VJ’s many followers is a village girl named Tanu, played by newcomer Akansha Ranjan Kapoor. After a Valentine’s Day party where several students observe her approaching VJ, Tanu accuses him of raping her.