Accused movie review: Konkona Sensharma anchors a MeToo drama that stays on the surface

Top-notch gynaecologist Geetika (Sensharma) has little patience for inefficient colleagues, and has no hesitation in dressing them down in public. Her wife Meera (Rannta, in her second outing after the delightful Laapata Ladies) is the softer, gentler of the two: she is also much younger, and distinctly so. A bump up in seniority for Geetika is expected any moment; the two are on the verge of adopting a baby, and everything seems to be going fine, until a sexual harassment accusation comes flying in against the former, and everything begins to unravel.

The location makes a difference: this film could only have been set in a country where same sex marriages are legal. The two women dress in accordance with their status-and-temperament, Geetika in smartly-tailored trousers and coats, Meera in flowy pastels. The appearance is spot on, but you soon start missing the detailing. Just what makes them who they are? As a viewer, I want to be drawn deep into the worlds of these women, and feel their inner turmoil, but they stay, mostly, on the surface.

The other characters, Monica Mahendru as the supportive HR head, Aditya Nanda as Meera’s too-helpful friend, Sukant Goel as a quirky private investigator, Kalliroi Tziafeta as Geetika’s still-hurting ex, Daniel Secondi as Geetika’s ambitious older colleague, Masshoor Amrohi as the nitpicking outsider brought in to sift through the conflicting she-did-it-no-I-didn’t statements, are all confined by their lines.

A character is told, in so many words, in this world of Me-Too, this is a platform meant for victims to come forward, or words to that effect. It feels like a rehearsed speech. Are you saying that I like younger girls, that I have a type, says another. Chote sheher ke closet mein dum ghut raha hota, says yet another. These on-the-nose dialogues give us cues on how we should feel when those characters are on screen, neither allowing the character to breathe, nor giving us a chance to make our way to our own feelings.

We hear these descriptives for Geetika: sex offender, predator, liar, cheater. How wonderful, we think, that Indian films have got to the point where they can give us an unconventional complex female character, who is not forced into being ‘good’, and an actor perfectly capable of pulling it off. Male aggressors there have been aplenty in Hindi cinema, but this has to be a first for the inclusion of a female predator, and that in itself should have given Accused some heft.

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But the writing offers us little depth, and that’s where this film, which had the potential to be a humdinger, falls flat. There’s so little passion between Sensharma and Rannta that you wonder what made them get together in the first place; what little we see is so chaste as to be non-existent. It takes an argument for both to break out; the supporting characters come off even worse, and the background music never quite stops tinkling away.

Finally, it all comes down to that thing which is increasingly, and disappointingly, becoming a streaming bugbear: the idea is bravely out-of-the-box ; the underlined writing does it in.

Accused movie cast: Konkona Sensharma, Pratibha Rannta, Aditya Nanda, Monica Mahendru, Sukant Goel, Kalliroi Tziafeta, Daniel Secondi, Masshoor Amrohi
Accused movie director: Anubhuti Kashyap
Accused movie rating: 1.5 stars