RANI RANI RANI (2024)
3 stars
Miracle Media. Digital. 2nd June
An interesting, if not entirely successful, exploration of time travel from India, written and directed by Rajaram Rajendran, whose background is in commercials and music videos it seems.
The film opens intriguingly – it is raining. In an abandoned building someone in a kind of spacesuit suddenly appears and then collapses, unconscious and is dragged away. This thread is then dropped and never explored (unless I missed something along the way).
Rani (Tannishtha Chatterjee) is walking in a field. She seems frustrated with her husband, who appears to be older than her and not in the best of health.
Cut to an advert TraansSpott – ‘Trip of a lifetime. Several times over … From the future to the present’. This is another thread that is then promptly dropped.
Rani tells her husband she is moving to the city with her two kids. He needs money for an operation. In the meantime she must go to her job as caretaker of an abandoned factory. The one we saw in the opening scene. Cleaning up the rubbish there. Meanwhile, four men in a truck – Krishna (Abid Anwar), Chris (Danny Sura), Aran, and John (Alexx O’Neill) – arrive at the self same building
They have some kind of future tech which they are looking to sell and make themselves rich. They are setting up for a demo. Rani finds them there and is at first wary of – until they offer her money to take part in their experiment. All she has to do is sit on a chair in the back of their pick-up and have her photo taken. She demands a lot of money before agreeing.
They run the experiment, despite the potential of the co-ordinates being a bit off… she promptly disappears and is time shifted, reappearing down the road from the location. Looking back down the road she sees herself walking.
What has happened? Can she get the quartet to run the time machine again and put things right?
The central concept is interesting, exploring parallel timelines with them possibly intersecting. Unfortunately the presentation here is so low key as to be quite dull in execution. Tannishtha Chatterjee is good in the central role, however the film as a whole feels more like an ‘exercise’ than a cohesive narrative. You are also left with a question – Is her name a ‘Doctor Who’ reference?
Steve Kirkham
