Merry Christmas to Killer Soup: The deadly common thread between them | Bollywood helobaba.com
Today marks 20 years since the release of Sriram Raghavan’s directorial debut feature, Ek Hasina Thi, a revenge saga starring Urmila Matondkar and Saif Ali Khan as star-crossed and blood-thirsty lovers. Right from that film till the director’s latest, Merry Christmas, he paints a woman who’s wronged by her lover and consequently devises an elaborate and intricate plan to get back at him.
(Also Read: Merry Christmas movie review: Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi sparkle in a Sriram Raghavan world)
The art of slow revenge
In Ek Hasina Thi, the first half revolves around Urmila’s character of a simple Maharashtrian girl getting framed by Saif’s charmer in a terrorist case. It’s only in her jailtime that she grows a thick skin and a steely resolve to avenge the betrayal. She chases him throughout the second half only to leave him stranded in a cave full of rats who chew on him like she would on her prey. Poetically, she ends up weaponising her fear of rats when pushed into a corner.
*spoilers ahead*
Unlike Ek Hasina Thi, Merry Christmas is the story of one singular night. Yet it’s a firm believer in slow revenge. Katrina Kaif’s Maria carefully constructs, minutely rehearses, and leisurely executes her killing plan. Her motive isn’t born from betrayal, but from domestic abuse by her druggie husband Jerome. With easy access and close proximity to him, she has all the tools to do the deed within the blink of an eye. So she artfully seduces not her target, but what’s equally crucial to a murder – a witness.
Both Sriram Raghavan thrillers operate on a slow and steady pace despite their wildly different time spans. He has a long shot on Urmila’s journey in Ek Hasina Thi, where she undergoes a transformation due to a life-altering experience. And he zooms in on just one night in Katrina’s journey, the fateful one where she decides to culminate her years-long frustration. We still see flashes of repentance on her face, unlike in case of Urmila, where she’s a woman who’s got nothing to lose.
Thrill-bombing vs. suspense-simmering
In Sriram’s previous directorial, Andhadhun (2018), Tabu’s Simi is also a woman with nothing to lose. But she doesn’t brew her murders, but acts on them like one does on hunger pangs. Moments after her boyfriend kills her husband (no prize for guessing why), she silently sobs as he disposes his body. But she also makes sure to steal the diamond ring on his finger hanging out from the body bag. She pushes an old woman down from the balcony, stabs a doctor multiple times, and tries to run her car over a blind man.
And yet when she’s pulled up by her boyfriend for being unable to kill a witness, she complains, “Main koi serial killer hu kya!” (Am I a serial killer or what). That line is also echoed by Konkona Sensharma’s Swati in Abhishek Chaubey’s recent Netflix India show Killer Soup. But her flagging of innocence isn’t to guard her incompetence, but to conceal her crime. She lies to her boyfriend Umesh (Manoj Bajpayee) after she (kind of) makes a suspecting cop fall off a cliff.
Like Tabu’s Simi, Konkona also kills by compulsion, but there’s a deep-seated simplicity to her intentions. She just wants to open a restaurant. But the problem is that she’s a bad cook. In the first few moments of the show, we see her cook a paya soup for her husband, who claims it’s “killer,” but ends up trashing it in the bin when she’s not looking. He’s perennially suffering from acidity, which symbolically says how Swati can’t satiate the needs of her man.
It’s only at the end when Swati uses the secret ingredient, black mushrooms, that everyone starts raving about her broth. Moments later, the skeletons come tumbling out of her closet. Her culinary satisfaction is short-lived as people start pointing fingers at her culpability. She tries to defend herself by putting forth her helplessness – it’s true that she committed all the crimes, but it’s only by doing those that she started getting closer to her dream, began getting validation from everyone – by adding more black mushrooms to her soul.
After getting exposed, and right before jumping off a cliff to her death, Swati asks, “How many do you think really liked my soup?,” leaving us to wonder whether all the crimes were really worth it. Tabu’s Simi also dies a painful death at the end of Andhadhun. After showing a brief flash of forgiveness towards Ayushmann Khurrana’s character, she can’t help but leave any loose ends. So she turns around her car, aiming at him, before crashing to death after an accident.
It’s interesting to see that both Tabu and Konkona’s characters are penalised for their deaths, whereas Katrina and Urmila’s are left to live. What did they do differently so as to earn that pardon? Well, that’s probably the difference between tasting salt to add and adding salt to taste: plotting a murder to avoid any loopholes and killing on whim and then wiping out witnesses.
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