The trailer does tell you the story, but does not prepare you enough for what you witness in the next two hours.
A strong, independent, level- headed urban Indian woman lands in the middle of a deserted village fighting a bunch of a rural hooligans. It is not another Mary Kom or Mardaani where you want to get up and give a short-lived applaud to women empowerment, its much more brutal, much more intense, and scary for real.
It starts with a rather questionable beginning. One completely fails to understand how a young couple who lives in Gurgaon would dare to mess with a group of evil dwellers from a village in Haryana for no sensible reason. The absence of google maps which makes getting lost the easy thing to do. There is also some forced 'Jat sarcasm' completely out of sync and a bit shoehorned. If you excuse some absence of logic, the trail of events thereafter is gripping, nightmarish and uncompromising. The cat and mouse chase between the urban couple Meera (Anushka Sharma), Arjun (Neel Bhopalam) and the bad-ass gang manages to keep you at the edge of your seat. The bleak and grimy tone is maintained throughout as the plot stretches over just one night. There is no concession to the barbarous violence, irrespective of the gender of the victim, or the culprit. Your heart aches at the beginning, but you grow stronger, as does Meera, towards the end, and right there lies the brilliance of its pace and storytelling. The last 15 mins of the movie take you to a level which has been a little far-fetched for female-role driven Indian cinema. The closest we got to this, from what I remember was Rekha in 'Khoon Bhari Maang'. But again, this time around its much more plausible.
Neel Bhoopalam is fresh, charming and appropriately weak. Darshan Kumar is fierce, but unfortunately the only misfit among the gang, struggling with his Haryanvi ascent. Deepti Naval is fittingly sinister, although a little more of her would not have hurt at all. All said and done, the hero of-course is Anushka Sharma. Her brilliant acts digs its claws into your heart with the sheer authenticity of her accumulated angst.
The music, background score and cinematography are spot on and perfectly compliment the narrative. If you can stomach the brutality of it, NH10 does call for one rough ride.
