Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Thar’ on Netflix, A Riff On Westerns Set In The Vast Desert of Northern India

Thar (Netflix), director Raj Singh Chaudhary’s stylized western noir set in the vast desert border region of Rajasthan, India, thrusts an aging police inspector played by Anil Kapoor into a knot of violence and vendettas. The twist? Kapoor’s son Harshvarrdhan Kapoor plays the guy who harbors the vendetta. 

THAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It’s 1985, and in a windswept village on the northern border of India, gunmen rumble into town and start shooting up the place. Sureka Singh (Anil Kapoor) is the chief inspector in Munabao, and he has a few theories about the mess they’ve left behind. It was either dacoit bandits, drug smugglers – opium has traveled back and forth between Rajasthan and nearby Pakistan for generations – or some kind of personal drama. After all, the dead guy’s daughter was about to be married. It’s something to chew on, anyway, both for Sureka and his portly deputy and confidante Bhur (Satish Kaushik), as retirement approaches for both of them. Meanwhile, a mysterious visitor who calls himself Siddharth (Harshvarrdhan Kapoor) taps three local hustlers for day labor in Delhi. The cocky, arrogant Panna (Jitendra Joshi, Sacred Games) is their mouthpiece, and he quickly agrees to the stranger’s terms. Too quickly, it turns out. Panna and his buddies are soon the man’s captives, chained up in makeshift Medieval stocks in the ruin of a military fort outside of town. And as all of this is going on, the inspector still has the hanging death of another local to deal with. The guy was tortured, too, before and after he died. “A different breed of vulture is circling over Munabao,” Sureka tells Bhur.

Siddharth is a man of few words, but it’s clear he’s up to something. Swarthy, with “Hollywood movie star hood looks,” he also quickly ingratiates himself with Panna’s pretty wife Kesar (Fatima Sana Shaikh), which causes suspicion amongst the gossipy villagers as well as Sureka, who suspects Siddharth might have ties to the drug smuggling or the recent violence. The inspector is also targeted by Hanif Khan (Rahul Singh), the boss of a rough-and-tumble bunch who are camped in the desert hills outside Munabao. Khan and his men are armed up with long guns from his connections to the Pakistani army, as the inspector and Bhur discover the hard way during a pitched gun battle amongst the Archean gneiss of the Thar.

As more is revealed about Siddharth’s intentions, more blood is spilled. And then even more trouble comes to town. Sureka, who at first was tickled pink to be performing some real police work for once, becomes increasingly concerned about the form of this unrest. He knows the sad fact of vendettas through the ages that remains forever true: Revenge neither offers justice, nor ends the hate.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The western flair of Thar simmers on the desert heat, and Raj Singh Chaudhary revels in Sergio Leone-style extended close-ups of profusely sweating men staring each other down and choosing their words carefully. There are also glimmers here of something like No Country For Old Men, another contemporary western that balanced an aging lawman against creeping evil, or even the gonzo, graphic violence and desolate landscapes of S. Craig Zahler’s 2015 film Bone Tomahawk.

Performance Worth Watching: Fatima Sana Shaikh is doing great work here as Kesar, the put upon wife who the toxic Panna mistreats but who nevertheless must hold herself to the expectations of both the caste system and the mouthy village mob.

Memorable Dialogue: “5,000 rupees for my work,” Panna tells Siddharth with a slick grin when offers him work in Delhi. And then, with a sneer, “2,000 for my reputation.” Panna knows the stranger has been talking to his wife. But his greed and arrogance blinds him to the larger motives at play.

Sex and Skin: A brief love scene, as well as a sequence of shocking sexual violence.

Our Take: Thar draws deep from the well of western film tradition while it stirs in references specific to its Indian setting, and it’s eminently satisfying. Instead of the systematic decomposition of a desert buffalo carcass to show the passage of time, it’s a water buffalo carcass. Instead of the bad men lurking in the hills outside of town being a band of bank robbers or soldiers cut loose from the Union Army, they’re a rangy group of thugs with ties to the Pakistani army. And instead of a white horse, the last honest lawman in this barren border town rides around in a trusty knockabout Mahindra-made Willys MB. That vehicle, with Inspector Singh at the wheel and Bhur valiantly firing his Garand at the bad guys, performs well in one particularly thrilling sequence, when the cops are pursued down a dusty, sun-blasted desert track by Khan and his henchmen’s equally ancient Land Rovers. The whole bit could easily be re-imagined as bandits on old bays tearing through desert passes in pursuit of the law’s quarter horses.

The Old West was often a violent place, at least in the movies. And Thar definitely takes that to heart in its second half. Siddharth, driven to extremes by grief and self-righteous anger, devises a series of increasingly awful tortures that he executes with sadistic glee. Have you ever wondered where a rat goes when it’s inside a metal bucket tied to a man and there’s heat from a torch…well, let’s just say it gets pretty grisly. Blinded, maddened even by rage, Siddharth is in no shape to heed the sage words of Sureka. “The path of revenge is fraught with peril,” the inspector intones in voiceover. “It won’t let you live, but it won’t let you die, either. The avenger always digs two graves.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Led by a stately, measured performance from Anil Kapoor, Thar mixes moody, sometimes bloody western film vibes into its classic tale of cutthroat crime and revenge in the borderlands of India.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

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