Urmila Matondkar vs Manoj Bajpayee: The night Kaun broke your nerves

I was young. I was naïve. And I watched Kaun alone, despite multiple warnings to not do so. I should’ve gained some wisdom from my Makdee experience, but I was just ready to watch a zippy thriller and quickly identify a killer as soon as I could.

Clearly, never rely on my choice of scary films, because it would just traumatise you. My best friends would vouch for it, and I agree humbly, with Urmila Matondkar’s tune is stuck in my head as I type this. 

Made on a shoestring budget, the film operated on just a few elements. There’s a nameless woman alone in the house. Her parents are ‘out’. A murderer, who kills women in their homes,  is on the loose and over-eager Manoj Bajpayee, who is also nameless, comes knocking at the door. It’s a stormy night, accompanied by a stormier background score.

Despite Matondkar’s insistence that Bajpayee leaves, he insists on entering: Outside is cold and rainy, he says. Inside, he plods around—watching TV, munching on a cheese sandwich—while the stormy background score ratchets up tension: The camerawork focuses on the statues, photos and rain. There are sudden blood-curdling flashbacks that are actually clues to the murders that are about to unfold.

And then, a police inspector, Sushant Kumar enters the scene. Now he and both Bajpayee are suspect (or sus like the Gen Z would say). Matondkar is terrified, switches between paranoia, fright and seeming survival skills. Bajpayee is so fabulously irritating and eerie, that you’re sure that maybe, just maybe, he could be the killer.

He’s got all the elements for it. But then why is Sushant here…and then while you toil and turn with these three people on a stormy night, you are literally stabbed with a plot twist.

Hello Matondkar, my 1990’s version self who had just blissfully watched Rangeela and Mast was not aware of your game.

Maybe my 2000’s self would’ve been aware, because Ek Hasina Thi, Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya had showed that Matondkar knew how to delve into the dark and twisted leanings of her roles, and if leaving them to rats in abandoned caves, then so be it (Still thinking of you Saif, in Ek Hasina Thi).

In Kaun, Matondkar drops the entire act of the nervous damsel alone at home: She comes through with such a diabolic, relentless brutality that quite like Bajpayee, you don’t have much time to recover and rally your wits. There’s no happy ending here: She’s the gruesome, grisly victor and the dead bodies piled up in the attic stand as testament. In the last scene of the film that will compel you to sleep with your eyes open, she gets another visitor: And she turns to the camera, with a smile, as she prepares for her next round of fresh meat.

Kaun is claustrophobic. It’s taut. It closes in on you. No gimmicks, no fluff—just raw, scarring tension. And it also teaches you a lesson or two perhaps: Maybe don’t take refuge in someone’s home during a rainy day, especially when they want you out. Sleep in the car. Maybe, go home.

Curiosity kills the cat. Maybe, it will just haunt you.