It’s best not to think too hard about Kaun? (1999), a genuinely gripping thriller with a soft spot for plot twists that call for additional clarifications that never come. It’s a dark-and-stormy-night chamber piece — it takes place in a huge mansion with lots of sinister decorative art lived in all alone by a never-named 20-something woman (Urmila Matondkar, doing much shrieking and whimpering) — that immediately makes you feel paranoid in a way that makes you want to laugh at yourself. (Its propensity for breathlessly melodramatic musical stings doesn’t help.) We overhear TV news reports about a string of killings in the neighborhood. All of them happened, apparently, after the murderer managed to sweet-talk the person behind the front door to let them inside.
Kaun?’s lead isn’t the type to welcome strangers. She spends the movie’s first few minutes working herself up into a fearful tizzy, reading too much into doors being slightly cracked open and her bedskirt looking perhaps more ruffled than it was earlier in the day. But her instincts are tested when, not long after the film opens, a bespectacled man named Sameer (Manoj Bajpayee) — all smiles and grating “ma’ams” — shows up at her doorstep, claiming his car has broken down and that he needs to use her phone.
The woman holds her ground. But Sameer continues to ring and plead no matter how many times he’s turned away, even insolently walking up to the home’s various side windows to plead his case. Whether or not he’s the killer the woman so fears, the persistence is scary, and Bajpayee, as irritating as his character can be, does a fine job making it difficult to get a handle on this stranger, who oscillates between dorky gangliness and traces of true menace.
The woman has a fair-enough reason to let Sameer in when she finally, improbably beckons her tormenter through the front door. More than one would expect from a one-setting, minimally cast movie, Kaun? keeps revealing itself to have fun tricks to expand on its bare-bones premise. Its final one is a curious case — both admirably daring and also spurious, leaving in its wake too many logical holes for it to be forgivably ambiguous. But until then it’s an intelligently constructed woman-in-trouble thriller descended from Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) or Dial M for Murder (1954) that never quite does what you infer it will.
