NFLX2019 November 15th: House Arrest

House Arrest. Shashanka Ghosh, Samit Basu. 2019. ☆☆☆★★★

I think this may be the final Indian Netflix Original of the year. They’ve been more miss than hit, so my expectations aren’t high.

This one starts off really well: They’re going for a kooky, topsy-turvy aesthetic, and the actors seem charming. It’s basically a screwball comedy with everything spiralling out of control? I think? I’m only fifteen minutes in.

It obviously a low budget movie, but they’ve worked around their limitations very neatly. They’ve set everything in one (gorgeous) flat, but people call him and when that happens, we see them being “teleported” into a the background of the shots. It’s gimmicky, but it’s cheap and fun and keeps thing snappy.

So it looks good, the characters are fun and inventive (love the upstairs gangster daughter), it’s inventive and the actors are great. So everything should be fine, right? But no: Instead of zapping along and building to some crescendo, the pacing is just way off. We get way too much of the (admittedly cute) love story, and too little of the craziness that we seem to have been promised.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.

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