Love Hostel movie review: Vikrant Massey is impressive in a well-directed but badly written thriller | Bollywood – Hindustan Times

If cinematographer-turned-director Shanker Raman’s first film, Gurgaon, was a slow, brooding neo-noir, his new film Love Hostel is anything but. zee5’s launch is so fast that it could easily have been better with an extra 30 minutes. the characters feel underdeveloped. plot developments are rushed. reveals thrown in to make characters complete are going nowhere. love hostel almost feels like an incomplete movie.

The intent was possibly to make a movie that moves as fast as bullets fly and bodies fall in this witty 90-minute thriller. works? He mostly doesn’t, except for the action scenes which are superbly choreographed by Amritpal Singh.

Set in Haryana, Love Hostel follows a newly married interfaith couple, Ahmed Vikrant Massey and Jyoti Sanya Malhotra, as they seek refuge in a government-protected home. this is a facility that provides secret housing for similar couples who might be harmed by their parents or communities after they approach the court for protection.

Ahmed and Jyoti’s happiness seriously infuriates Jyoti’s grandmother, Mla Kamala Dilawar (Swaroopa Ghosh). kamala is a traditionalist and she wants jyoti to come home so she can kill her. She tasks Dagar (Bobby Deol), a crazed hit man with a disfigured face, with tracking down Ahmed and Jyoti. Dagar is very keen on hunting down couples who marry against his parents’ wishes. which is related to an event from his past that, when revealed near the end of the movie, really made me want to tear my hair out.

the snippets of love hostel are so lazily written that I suspect the producers put a gun to raman’s head to finish the film in too short a time. or maybe the movie was over-edited to ensure the running time is 90 minutes.

but because raman’s filming is so deliberate, as seen in gurgaon, it’s hard to believe anything in love hostel is a mistake.

Love Hostel, written by Shanker Raman, Mehak Jamal, and Yogi Singha, strongly reminded me of Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men (2007) because of many elements in the plot, only least of which is a highly sincere hitman.

there is a protagonist who gets involved with the bad guys and runs with a bag of money. Ahmed’s past is not something he can reveal without spoiling the movie.

there is dagar, of course. deol is enough on paper. it doesn’t have much to do other than suggest a menacing presence. there’s also a good cop, sushil rathi raj arjun, who is the moral center of the movie, tracking down both the hero and the villain.

Other things that reminded me that no country is for old men was a tracking device similar to the one anton chigurh uses to track down his targets. there is also a shootout scene at the love hostel which is very similar to the one between chigurh and llewelyn moss at the hotel. this scene in love hostel is spectacularly done. Vivek Shah’s cinematography makes these few minutes seem super gritty yet luxurious. Massey really looks like an action hero in these places. he was the most impressive element for me in love hostel. you should really consider making smart action movies.

Overall, love hostel has nothing interesting or serious to say about interfaith or intercaste couples. there is a gay couple in the movie, but it could have just been straight. it sounds like the writers wanted to make a point, but couldn’t or didn’t. the number one priority here was to make a tight thriller. in that sense, parts of love hostel are very well done. but the sum of its parts doesn’t really work. the movie needed much better writing to make all of these characters, especially dagar, look like humans and not cardboard cutouts.

love hosteldirector: shanker ramancast: sanya malhotra, vikrant massey and bobby deol