From the beginning, Shakun Batra’s Gehraiyaan (Depth) submerges itself into heavy waters to unleash painful memories, infidelity, and heartbreaking secrets underneath the surface. The film uses the crashing waves to symbolise the passion of two young people. The comfort of these dangerous waters are only known to Alisha (Deepika Padukone) and Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi), who stray away from their partners, eventually revealing their true selves. Batra’s third directorial feature is a breathtaking page-turner that relies on the realistic, and yet uninspired, narrative.
The film follows Alisha, a yoga instructor who is working on developing a fitness app. Her professional and personal life are in disarray, as she is the only provider in her long-term relationship with her partner Karan (Dhairya Karwa), an author struggling to finish his book. Over the weekend, Alisha agrees to meet her estranged cousin Tia (Ananya Panday) at their family beach house after many years. There, she meets Tia’s fiance Zain, a real estate agent, and after exchanging a few secret messages, they begin a passionate affair. Months later, the cracks in their relationship begin to surface as Zain and Alisha head over troubled waters with reality, secrets, and lies complicating their affair.
Gehraiyaan’s many themes lay the foundation in the movie: infidelity, the aftermath of a loved one’s suicide, the perceptions of parents’ love, difficult childhoods, and financial constraints. Batra dives into the unfamiliar territory of domesticity that is often not shown in Indian movies. The director is curious to look at the human conditions and the inevitability of Alisha and Zain’s relationship.
Once a single lie is told, the events of the movie spin out of control. Alisha and Zain’s decision to begin an affair makes them reprehensible to their respective partners. Every human being is flawed; however, the movie doesn’t portray any of these characters as criminals. As Alisha and Zain continue their relationship, it is not enough to justify their actions and the situation becomes morally ambiguous. The desperate attempts to escape this affair leads one of them to criminality, and their personal life is etched in anxiety, fear, and dishonesty being revealed to others. The truth, as uncomfortable as it is, is that both Alisha and Zain had a choice.
Gehraiyaan also observes the relationship between Alisha and her father Vinod (Naseeruddin Shah), a broken man who is unable to express his emotions to his daughter. When Alisha was a young child, she witnesses the death of her mother by suicide, causing her to be riddled with anxiety. She is plagued with demons of the sad reminder that her life might end just like her mother. The layers peel back slowly to reveal a family secret that nearly destroyed her family and did ultimately destroy her mother. Alisha and her father’s relationship has been strained since her mother’s death, and it is a tough narrative to explore, as far as dysfunctional families go.
Gehraiyaan’s premise is promising, with an excellent performance by Padukone — she makes anything look effortless. Here she portrays a troubled woman, with frustration and desperation leading her down a path of recklessness. However, the movie’s 158-minute runtime could have been cut down, as the pacing gets monotonous. Gehraiyaan’s characters dominate the screen just like the ocean, and Batra focuses on the relentless examination of the human condition. Loneliness and fear emerge to the surface and fill the air with a foreboding nature that warps them into paranoia. There is nothing about Gehraiyaan that depicts infidelity as a simple affair; rather, it shows how secrets destroy people and set off a chain of events that cannot be undone.
