Kalank – Movie Review

If I need to analogize, Kalank is like a movie version of the Fyre Festival. The promos look great and promising with grandiose visuals and set designs. The stellar cast brings in more intrigue to the product and the record-breaking songs, are an added bonus. However, you’ll only know the conspicuous truth once you go and suffer through the entire thing or if somebody is genius enough to release a documentary about the subject later on Netflix. I hope that somebody filmed the entire writing process of this movie, cause that should be really interesting to watch and witness a group of people trying to piece together a car crash of a script.

Set in 1946 the storyline explores an offbeat relationship between Roop (Alia Bhatt), a wholesome young woman who is sustaining an unplanned royal marriage and Zafar (Varun Dhawan), a blacksmith who lives with the minorities in the city. Subsequently, their odd relationship causes issues between both the communities as the remaining part of this daft narrative parades the aftermath, twists and turns and the overall stupidity of the entire film.

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First off, I want to give credit where credit’s due, and the production team must be appreciated for their remarkable effort to make the movie look exquisite on-screen. Everything from the production design to the fabulous camera work by Binod Pradhan deserves applause as every single frame in the film is presented as being lavish, grand and vibrantly colored. The VFX blended in flawlessly with the set design most of the time, although it did take me out of the experience here and there which was totally excusable.

Having said that, even when you decorate your film with appealing visuals and when the storyline (the heart and soul of any movie) was non-existent, it will end up as a disappointment. And Kalank is a monumental debacle as well as, a catastrophic narrative fiasco. The movie starts off with sizeable potential and the ability to explore something unique with the shelled out plot. But, right about thirty-minutes into the narrative, it descends into a never ending abyss of boredom, annoyance and stupidity. Additionally, the conversations between the characters filled with extreme nothingness, the long and random character scenes, the slow-mo shots everything bored me to tears that I had to break my theater etiquette rules and kept checking my phone regularly throughout the runtime.

Furthermore, clocking around the two-hour-fifty-minute mark, the runtime of this movie (much similar to last year’s historical epic, Padmaavat) was far-stretched for no reason. The 170-minute narrative which involved awful pacing issues, terrible editing choices and monotonous subplots featuring Kunal Khemu’s character only fetched me more headache issues, and at a certain point, I was ready to get up and leave. The performances from the fantabulous cast weren’t unique or special, except for Sonakshi Sinha and Aditya Roy Kapur who had their moments to shine together.

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Overall, Kalank, much like every Dharma Productions’ film is decorated with magnificent set designs and was a visual extravaganza. But, the movie only got worse and worse with every ticking minute and was a trainwreck when it comes to storytelling and creating a much-needed intrigue for the viewer. Wish I had the Shift+Delete button programmed in my brain, cause I don’t want to see this film even in my trash can.

Rating – 1.5/5 | Grade – D+

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