Khap Hindi Movie
A couple tries to stealthily sneak out of the village in order but are caught and assassinated. Their crime? Having fallen in love with the person of the Gotra clan. Such are the type of killings widely prevalent in North India called Honour Killing. And filmmaker Ajay Sinha deals with this topic in his film Khap.
Khap, which is basically a body governing 40 villages, is the story of a village Sajod where the President of the Khap Chaudhary (Om Puri) mercilessly orders killings of those lovers who choose to marry within the same gotra meaning clan. His son Madhur (Mohnish Bhel) reproaches such methods and leaves the house. 16 years and multiple such deaths later, Mohnish has to return to his village to investigate and stop the massacre. In the process he dies and his daughter Ria (Uvika Chaudhary) who is in love with Kush (Sarrtaj), is forced to come to the village. Chaudhary gets her married to Kush only to come to know later that they belong to the same gotra. Now whether he lets them get slaughtered too or saves their lives follows through the rest of the plot.
Ajay Sinha who's made an obscure film Stop in the past delivers a very shoddy effort in dealing with a sensitive subject such as Honour Killing. Instead of delving deeper into the topic he tries to fictionalise the story to such extremes that there is a love story with many lovey dovey songs, lots of father-son drama and rona-dhona in the end. However, in a bid to increase the stickiness of his content and not make it appear like a docu-drama, Ajay somewhere kills his film with his own hands with the juvenile execution of everything. Right from the internet love story of Ria and Kush where the emoticon flies right out of the computer screen roams the whole of Delhi and lands into another comp, to the love song where there are texts like Love is beginning, love is in mid air, love is flying high to show the passage of time or even the impromptu, out of context speech of Alok Nath to show the positives of Khap everything is very amateurish.
The only thing worth looking out for in the film is Om Puri's acting. He alone tries to salvage the film but the poor script fails him in his efforts. Everything else remains as shallow and superficial as the fake fire they use to burn people and the croma work of Red Fort from the window of Mohnish Behl's house to show that they stay in Delhi. Uvika Chaudhary needs to work on her dialogues only then can she save the irritating dubbing that happens on her voice throughout. Debutante Sarrtaj needs to go back to taking acting lessons before he tries his hands at it again. Mohnish Behl should look for films that give him some character weight.
To sum it up, Khap is easily avoidable.
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