HER Chapter 1 Movie Review: Ruhani Sharma, Ravi Varma Starrer Is A Dreadfully Disembodied Police Procedural

There should be a law restraining the incessant flow of police procedurals from the South Indian film industry. For one, there are way too many films in this genre to be taken seriously. Secondly, this one deserves to be in the trashcan. It is smug and self-involved and with so sense of pacing or plotting.

Hence in spite of being a whodunit, and wrapping up its bloody mess in less than two hours, the proceedings leave us feeling cheated and let down. To begin with, there are two brutal murders. Later there is one more. But I am still not clear what the third murder has to do with the first two.

In the pursuit of a killer of a thriller, the film’s editor(Chanakya Reddy Toorupu) forfeits coherence for celerity.

On the plus side, there is the female hero, the shero, if you will. Ruhani Sharma’s Archana Prasad is a self-made cop. She takes no nonsense from her seniors and leads her team without playing the feminine card. Archana Sharma looks comfortable in khaki even when the rest of the cast looks uncertain about what to do with their uniformed presence. However, her character is required to grow in a vacuum.

The plot provides no support system for its protagonist to emerge with her identity. Archana Sharma remains a cop struggling to be more than just a nudge to token empowerment.

Watching Her: Chapter 1 is like reading hoardings from a moving train. There are interesting glimpses here and there. But the plot remains largely unexplored and underdeveloped. Every character acts as though he or she is up to something life-changing. But the end result is so compromised and ineffective that it feels more like whydoneit rather than a whodunit.

The film ends tragically unfinished with a promise for a sequel. The fact that the denouement is so poor is not the biggest problem here. We just don’t care enough about the murder victims to want to know why they were killed.