Dial 100

"Jab 100 number dial karte hain log, kahin na kahin maddat ki umeed hoti hai logon mein" says Sr Police Inspector Nikhil Sood, speaking to a distressed caller from his Emergency Control Room in Mumbai. Written and directed by Rensil D'Silva, Dial 100 starts off as a slow burn thriller before losing steam and reaching a tepid end.

The Mumbai Police Emergency Control Room receives a cryptic phone call from a distraught woman who wishes to speak with Senior Police Officer Nikhil Sood (Manoj Bajpayee) before committing suicide. Nikhil, on the other hand, has no idea that his efforts to save her will jeopardise his own family, as dark secrets from his past threaten to destroy his present.

Dial 100 seems less of a thriller and more of an answer to the oft-asked question, 'What's it about?' The movie unfolding before us has the brevity of a synopsis rather than the structure of a script as though roughly describing the outline but leaving out all the juicy details.

There are many implausibilities in Dial 100, penned and directed by Rensil D'Silva - a problem with much of Indian cinema which tolerates and thrives on lazy writing. It has become a matter of habit with us to not just bear shoddy scripting, but also celebrate it. Dial 100 could have been a neat edge-of-the-seat thriller, but what begins with a bang ends in a whimper, to use a cliche.

Written and directed by Rensil D'Silva, Dial 100 is an intense slow-burner that revolves around a police officer who must pull out the stops to save his family. This is conventional territory for suspense writers who seek to explore the lengths to which a man will go to protect those he loves the most.

Imagine the trailer of a suspense thriller giving away more information about the plot than the average review would. Imagine a team so inattentive to detail, that a prominent character in the storyline is listed by a different name in the credits. On second thoughts, do not trouble yourself to imagine any of this - let me just tell you about Dial 100.

On a stormy night in Mumbai, a call comes in on the Dial 100 helpline in a police station, where a night-shift-as-usual is underway. The caller is a woman (Neena Gupta), on the verge of full-blown hysteria, threatening to do something drastic; the cop (Manoj Bajpayee) who fields the call is already tense, dealing with a teary wife (Sakshi Tanwar) and a young son who's gone and done something he had sworn off.