‘Dwitiyo Purush’ is Srijit Mukherjee at his darkest

The exceedingly prolific director Srijit Mukherjee makes genre leaps so suddenly and so steep, there’s always the risk of him slipping into the crack. This time in Dwitiyo Purush, he makes the leap. But just about. The film is dark and very consciously contemporary with a very prominent homosexual undercurrent running across the plot like a scampering rat on a sinking ship not knowing which way to go.

As a sequel to the 2011 thriller Baishe Srabon, Dwitiyo Purush has ample ammunition at its disposal to fire some knock-outs. A cop-serial killer thriller needs a hero and a villain who can match paces. Parambrata Chatterjee as the cop with serious marital issues seems conflicted by the diversity of the material that the plot throws forward. He is uncharacteristically hammy in the melodramatic end-game, unsure of how the character should respond to the shocking developments.

On the surface Srijit explores age-old cinematic dynamics of the killer and his nemesis. On another level, this a story of a crumbling marriage where the wife, played with disappointing placidity and borderline absentmindedness by Raima Sen, throws the ultimate insult at her husband about the “lousy 15-minute sex” that they don’t have any longer.

Not to be left behind, the husband reminds his wife of how expensive rice is these days when she walks off the dinner table in a huff.

Ouch to that.