It has been four years since the release of Kabir Singh and I have staunchly committed to my refusal to watch the movie. I have watched snippets on social media, of course – a broken surgeon who goes down the pathway of sex, drugs and misdemeanour when his beau gets married to the man of her family’s choice. At one point, he slaps her across the face and also threatens her classmates to physically drag her out of class while she accepts; she is the perfect vision of a madonna that men aspire to have. She does not second guess his abusive, manipulative ways, and in the end, they are reunited. The man gets the woman and ends up redeeming himself, after having operated on his patients in a drug and alcohol fueled haze, chasing after his househelp when she questions him as she runs and screams for her life in fear, and threatening people around him.
I was seventeen or eighteen perhaps when Kabir Singh came out; in my last year of high school, excited for college and the pre-medicine track. I had always been the staunch feminist of the class, getting into spats with the young boys around me about how they were not allowed to objectify me or the women around them. They loved Kabir Singh – quoting his dialogues, snickering at the very kind (albeit too passive) Biology teacher that frowned and ignored their misogyny aimed towards her and my fellow classmates too often, and let them walk out of classmates with thinly veiled threats about how influential their fathers were.
I did not, however, care too much– they were young boys, weren’t they? In one such argument I told them very clearly: ‘The things you are watching have rotted your brains through and through. This is not a gangster movie, and you have a future ahead of you. You can’t talk to me, or other women this way. I’m reporting you to the school admin.’
The response I heard still chills me to this day. I’m twenty-one now, far beyond being that confrontational, but I still hear it in my head sometimes: ‘Women like you need to be picked up from where they are, dragged out, and taught a lesson. Only when they get some is when they’ll learn to lighten up.’
Knowing that Sandeep Reddy Vanga, the famed director of Kabir Singh, came out with a new movie already made me feel ill. I thought about the new generation of young women that would be threatened by jeering, malice-filled, contemptuous young men
I got very quiet after that. Of course, influence meant nothing happened, as it never does. Young men are allowed to traumatise young women in the name of ‘growth,’ hoping that one day, they will grow beyond their vices while women have to bear the brunt of this transformation.
Knowing that Sandeep Reddy Vanga, the famed director of Kabir Singh, came out with a new movie already made me feel ill. I thought about the new generation of young women that would be threatened by jeering, malice-filled, contemptuous young men who thought that a show of masculinity involved smoking too many cigarettes, knocking back a few, grabbing a doe-eyed, innocent girl out of her home or her classroom and ‘corrupting’ her, and of course – cheating. How can we ever forget the greatest show of masculinity and control - infidelity.
Ranvijay "Vijay" Singh (played by Ranbir Kapoor) is the son of Balbir Singh (played by Anil Kapoor), a business magnate who heads the family-owned steel company, Swastik Steels. Vijay adores his father, but the latter is too obsessed with his work to ever give him filial warmth; when he runs into his elder’s sister’s college wielding an AK-47 after he finds out she has been bullied and proceeds to run over said bullies with his SUV, he is exiled by his father to the US. ‘I am not a criminal,’ he screams, ‘I am the man of this house!” He returns to Delhi after completing his education, where he decides to go to his classmate Geetanjali’s engagement. He always had a crush on her, he confesses, and tells her about how she deserves an ‘alpha’ to protect her; commenting on the size of her pelvis and how it can ‘accommodate healthy children.’ She, of course, leaves her family behind for him.
Vijay also clashes with his brother-in-law at a family event and is yet again, exiled to the US alongside Geetanjali. They have two kids and lead a peaceful life, until Balbir is shot by unknown assailants, leading to Vijay returning and promising to avenge his father.
It is as if Scarface, the Godfather trilogy and Goodfellas copulated to give birth to something that tries too hard to be like all of them simultaneously and fails so miserably that it makes you blanch; just like the titular protagonist, Vijay and his daddy issues border on the emotionally incestuous.
He kills his brother-in-law, directly involved in the murder, complemented by his entourage of cousins that he has called in from Punjab to help him with the hunt. Next, we have a 20-minute fight sequence where Vijay, at a hotel, single-handedly murders three-hundred men in three different manners – rifles, axes and a strange device that he can drive and ambush the men with. He ends up killing the mastermind behind the plan, Asrar Haque (played by Babloo Prithiveeraj), and promises to hunt down the men before going into a coma. Next, to aptly put, the movie drags along with too many references to his urinary function, his sex life, and his immediate recovery after which he abandons his wife to have sex with Zoya (Tripti Dimri), whose fiance’s heart has been transplanted into his chest. Only to find out she is a honey trap, and chasing down Abid (played by Saurabh Sachdeva) and Abrar Haque (played by Bobby Deol). The post-credits scenes, bloody and gore-laden, hints at a sequel to the movie– Animal Park, which will feature Ranbir in a double role.
To put it very aptly, Animal is three hours and twenty minutes of an oedipal sob-story about a man-child, nepotism baby of a business tycoon that often wields rifles and tries to run over people with his shiny new SUVs; while having plenty of sex and making one too many scatological jokes. It is as if Scarface, the Godfather trilogy and Goodfellas copulated to give birth to something that tries too hard to be like all of them simultaneously and fails so miserably that it makes you blanch; just like the titular protagonist, Vijay and his daddy issues border on the emotionally incestuous.
Violence is depicted for the sake of violence, the protagonist has zero growth or even the slightest inkling of a redemption arc, and it is certainly no story of the vices and greed in bourgeois families that it could have been. I saw some people talking about how Scarface and The Godfather had violence; well… how about the fact that it was nitty gritty, seeping into the evil of substances and the drug business while showing how the protagonists lose all their humanity and sanity until they end up suspended between their humanity and their avarice. Animal is none of that– if you remember the Kiss of Death from Godfather, it takes a similar route where Vijay kisses his sister’s forehead and then the screen flashes to him killing her husband. It wants to be emotionally charged, but it is not. You don’t even want to root for the protagonist.
The right-wing iconography is not missed; Vijay argues that the symbol of his family business is not a Swastika, but 30-minutes before that, it cuts to a scene of him giving a speech in front of one with his arm raised, with the workers in attendance cheering for him as he growls about creating a blood-bath and murdering anyone that well near touched his father. Rather reminiscent of a very similarly violent character in history.
The misogyny is so rife, I was shocked – in an interview, Vanga said if people thought Kabir Singh was violent, he would show them more violence. Well, considering the fact that Vijay Singh tells his wife when she exclaims that he has murdered people that he shall ‘slap’ her, just like he would ‘slap a man,’ and follows this up with another scene where he pinches her back so hard after he finds out he is undergoing renal failure that she is left with bruising and inevitably slaps him in self-defence, and another sequence with him yelling at how she is crass for talking about ‘changing her pads four times a month’ while he is doing it ‘fifty times a day,’ I was at a loss of words. Also, please talk to the women around you – if they changed their pads ‘four times a day’ they would go into toxic shock.
Of course, he also cheats to ‘get information’ from Zoya, after which he asks her to kneel down and lick his shoes clean if she wants him to forgive her betrayal, and returns home to his wife to tell her: ‘I cheated – you forgave me for hundreds of murders, but not some sex?’ As any sane person would, she screams about how Vijay’s obsession with his father has ruined their lives and he pulls out a rifle to shoot right near her head. And then they have sex, of course. But don’t worry – his wife slaps him a few times for cheating and once for physically leaving her bruised; so it is very give-and-take, is it not?
It is a misogynist’s wet dream reincarnate – and I know for sure that many men will mock women who come out with their experiences in light of these movies that actively glorify these acts rather than call them what they are: immortal, disgusting and unforgivable.
Even the villain played by Deol doesn’t stay back– he is a Muslim man, whose grandfather ‘converted’ so he could have more wives. He is mute and has three wives, and at one point, has sex with all of them at the same time. Covered in blood. Cue the circus music.
It is also worthwhile to talk about why this movie seems like one that trashes art in the name of generating clickbait reels and shorts talking about submission and alpha-masculinity by Andrew Tate-worshipping men.
It is a misogynist’s wet dream reincarnate – and I know for sure that many men will mock women who come out with their experiences in light of these movies that actively glorify these acts rather than call them what they are: immortal, disgusting and unforgivable. Of course, violence on screen is something that happens, so is sex. I’ve enjoyed mafia movies and shows, they might be one of my favourite genres. But never has any media glorified violence, gore, bloodshed and death to this extent, and for sure know this will have an irredeemable affect on young men’s psyche and young women’s safety.
Film makers have a moral and social responsibility and are widely subject to critique – what does not generate conversation is vilifying experiences and being so senselessly embedded in toxic macho-ness that all standards of empathy, kindness and base human emotions are abandoned to become just what this movie shows: an animal.