I am very much a proponent of Hindi movies moving away from the “intermingling of genres” or masala template into something resembling a full-blown genre treatment. That’s not to say that the Girish Kohli directorial completely dedicates itself to the genre it has devoted its film to, but for the most part it succeeds.
Structured as a film set in a single location—in this case, the car of Dr. Abhimanyu Sood (Sohum Shah)—”Crazxy” (2025) doesn’t stubbornly dedicate itself to being stuck fully inside the car for gimmick purposes. The gimmick we realize is the camera completely being invested in the journey of this flawed, compelling doctor, whose no-good, very bad day begins as he is traveling with a bag of settlement money for a malpractice case he is interested in settling out of court. In this journey, he is contacted by a man claiming to have kidnapped his daughter. Previously believing it to be a prank and then believing it to be a conspiracy hatched by his ex-wife to emotionally torture him, his day begins to get worse when he realizes that the prank call might just be true.
Sohum Shah, since the success of the re-release of “Tumbaad,” has been granted a perception of the risk-taker. His narrative of a man interested in acting, very much screenplay-focused, is also heavily targeted, rightfully so in kind, at the incoherent screenplays of most Hindi commercial movies obfuscated at the scale. In a recent interview, his emphasis on coherence in screenplays definitely holds water if one looks at “Crazxy,” a movie both in service to the gimmick as well as to a screenplay so much interested in engagement that the verisimilitude ensures the logical progression of those sequences.
To that end, exposition comes quick, through conversation rather than dumping all at once. The backstory of Sood, his complicated family life, strained relationship with his ex-wife, and apparently more harmonious relationship with his girlfriend who shares a similar pragmatic worldview as him are all expressed through these well-crafted naturalistic conversations. It is further aided by Shah’s performance, who holds the screen and is very believable as a man easy to hate but also intelligent enough to understand and solve the crisis plaguing him and his family.
But truly the praise should be afforded to director Girish Kohli, especially for a ten-minute sequence in the second half of the film, where Sood has to aid his junior doctor at executing a complicated operation via video call, fix a flat tire, and convince the kidnapper. It’s a tense sequence made with precision due to fantastic intercutting, use of music, shifting of perspectives through unique camera angles, and of course due to the central performance.
Crazxy’s primary flaw is in the “commercial” elements encroaching upon this genre picture. The overwhelming use of background score in the emotional sequences, or the splicing in of remixed versions of older songs, threatens to disengage the viewer. It gives the impression of a film under-confident of the engaging screenplay, which until the final act does a great job of holding the viewer under a vice and even managing to maintain the gimmick of not letting the camera be distant from either the car or Sood.
It’s in that final act, where the film finally tries to move forward and deliver a cathartic ending, that it falls apart. The unfurling of the revelation hints at something surreal, almost dreamlike in its ridiculousness, but then Kohli’s screenplay finally takes an easy way out by utilizing a phone call and revealing the truth, which results in a twist so ludicrous I couldn’t stop the laugh emanating from myself in the theater. It’s ridiculous not because it is offensive by any measure, but because its silliness breaks that elusive verisimilitude utterly. It makes that emotional ending fall flat entirely, because by that point I am completely disengaged.
Director Girish Kohli definitely has crafted a genre film in the vein of an M. Night Shyamalan picture, but without the absolutely ludicrous dialogue writing. It does share Shyamalan’s penchant for ridiculous twists at the end of his films, and while that can serve as a deal breaker, “Crazxy” (2025) is successful in what it sets out to do—announce a new interesting voice on the block in Girish Kohli and establish Sohum Shah as one of the more interesting producers in the creative space.
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