Have you read the book Love Games, asks a rich bored widow of an equally bored rich young man. He hasn’t, and so she explains the nature of their latest sexcapade based on this book. That such a book ever got published is in itself disturbing, but it’s the Bible for the hedonistic and unhinged Ramona (Patralekhaa) who is addicted to addiction – sex, drugs, evil and her f*** buddy Sam (Gaurav Arora). The film opens with Ramona’s wealthy husband mysteriously falling to his death. Does she have something to do with it? Probably.
After his mother left home to be with another man, Sam has been plagued by abandonment issues – this is the conclusion arrived at by his psychiatrist. Sam has everything in his life except love. This is also the psychiatrist’s conclusion based on the ‘SH’ Sam inflicts on himself – that’s Self-Harm by the way. Sam is prone to getting high and then cutting himself because physical pain is all he feels. Otherwise he is numb, a “zombie”. Walking dead Sam indulges in all kinds of kinky experiences with Ramona until their love games bring him in contact with the intelligent and vulnerable doctor Alisha (Tara Alisha Berry), who is trapped in an abusive marriage. Her only reason for not leaving her psychotic husband (Hiten Tejwani) is fear.
Alisha fills that missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of Sam’s life. Credit for that metaphor goes firmly to writer-director Vikram Bhatt. Ramona is incensed at losing her plaything so she starts another love game, this time involving Sam, Alisha and Alisha’s violent husband, but in this version of the game there are likely to be an equal number of winners and losers.
Bhatt’s story is designed to shock. It exploits ideas like the wife as a possession; rich, bored people with too much idle time on their hands; drug abuse, threesomes, etc. While the three principal actors – Arora, Patralekhaa and Berry – dive into their shallow parts with gusto, they are encumbered by completely unbefitting costuming and hairstyling and clumsy dialogues.
Sample this:
When Alisha confronts Ramona, she says, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
Ramona replies, “I am very bad at this Shakespeare type of English.”
Alisha to Ramona, “But you are good at murder.”
And when Ramona does murder, she plays Candy Crush while watching a man die. “Delicious” sings her phone. Later, when she watches Sam execute a finely orchestrated plan, she trills, “This is exciting” and the background music sings along in a chorus: “Exciting, exciting”. Sorry, I must disagree.
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