A Wednesday!

A thriller set in Mumbai. A man telephones police headquarters. He says he has placed five bombs in the city and has one demand: four prisoners are to be released. The commissioner keeps the line open. The team starts searching; they trace the call, try to find him, and the city begins to be evacuated. Who he is, is unknown. He has no record, no organisation, no name. From there the film covers one day, a few hours. Phone calls, radio traffic, pressure from a journalist and two officers in the field. The demand is accepted and the prisoners are moved. Then the narrative goes somewhere unexpected. The man's real intention is not what he said, and in the last section he explains it himself. What the narrative is interested in is not terrorism but the ordinary person: its question is someone with no authority setting out to do what the state could not, and what that means. The film takes a side on this and stands in a disputed place; it knows that, and leaves the argument open in the last scene. It is short; the narrative runs under a hundred minutes and takes place almost entirely between two actors. Anupam Kher plays the commissioner and Naseeruddin Shah the man. Jimmy Shergill is in the cast. Neeraj Pandey wrote and directed; it is his first feature. The film was remade in other languages. Who it is for: anyone who likes tension built out of conversation. Who it is not for: anyone the politics will trouble; the view the film defends is plain and it leaves the other side no room.