Towards the end of the movie Accused, the main character, Dr. Geetika Sen, talks about sexism and preconceived notions she faced in life. The conversation shifts to a grey area when she addresses the issues in the way she tried to change them by challenging them harshly. Accused could have been a very nuanced study about workplace sexism, almost like an Anubhav Sinha approach, where things are never black and white. However, Anubhuti Kashyap’s movie is struggling to build flesh around the core idea. What you eventually get is a thriller muddled in cliches and rarely triggers excitement in you.
Dr. Geetika Sen is an experienced doctor who has managed to build a career and reputation in a fairly short amount of time. She lives in the UK with her partner, Dr. Meera. One day, the hospital received an anonymous complaint via email stating that Dr. Geetika had sexually harassed that person. In a few days, the number of complaints increased, and due to massive online backlash, the hospital decided to conduct an internal investigation. What happens in that investigation and what actions Geetika takes in the meantime is what we see in Accused.
As I said, the idea is to build a thrilling drama that will lead to a discussion around the mentality of people in general towards successful women. But writers Sima Agarwal and Yash Keswani are not able to structure the story in an enticing way. The beats of this thriller are so generic that at no point are you genuinely curious to know who did it. There is nothing unexpected happening in the script that would bring our attention to the thriller aspect of the movie. Rather than focusing on the case, the movie is going after this contrived relationship tussle that rarely achieves anything.
The visual style and language of this movie set in London follows the typical Netflix color palette with faded colors. The problem is with the writing, and it struggles to make the main character’s fight look authentic on screen. Geetika and Meera’s reactions in certain scenarios feel very staged. The whole relationship track that runs parallel to the main one has a very brittle foundation, and you can really see the writing desperately trying to add these outdated blame game tropes. The spoon-feeding nature of the dialogues and staging is such that some of the reactions and responses of foreign characters almost felt like the roles were written as Indian characters played by Indian actors, but they had to change the casting and location at the last minute. To compensate for the lack of thrill in the narrative, the movie uses a background score almost throughout.
Konkona Sensharma as Dr. Geetika Sen performs that self-obsessed character in a believable way, despite the script creating moments that don’t really give layers to that character. Laapata Ladies fame Pratibha Rannta gets to play a character in a different zone altogether. When you look at the primary idea of the movie and what the film predominantly wants to discuss, this relationship chapter in the script feels like an optional accessory, and the story would have worked even without it. And the weird part is that most of the subplots in the movie are from this relationship track. Mashhoor Amrohi plays the role of this investigator who claims to have experience, but we never really feel it in the way he handles people. Most of the foreign actors in the movie are outright bad, and it is almost like they are trying to mimic the meter of a typical Bollywood performance.
Accused is a movie that had the potential to explore the complex aspects of the idea it wanted to discuss. Despite being a direct-to-OTT film, it takes a very lousy approach in writing a compelling drama, and what you ultimately get is a movie that uses its politics as a shield against possible criticisms over unimaginative writing. With a runtime of 106 minutes, Accused is a bearable film with a flat emotional graph.
