From the rearview mirror of a car hangs an ornament with a caricature and quote of Quentin Tarantino that tells you everything you need to know about Kashan Admani’s debut film Carma. The quote reads: Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.

As the first minutes of Carma whizz past, one can’t help but feel that Admani and screenwriter Fawad Hai seem to have taken Tarantino’s quote to heart.

Carma, a play on the word ‘karma’ and ‘cars’ (both aspects being prevalent in the story), is a ‘new-age thriller’; a twisting, turning tale about criminals and criminal intent.

Hamza (Osama Tahir), a young man with anxiousness dripping from his face and body language, is abducted by a gang of villains led by a badass female boss who wears a matching shade of lipstick and leather jacket (Zhalay Sarhadi leads Paras Masroor, Umar Aalam and Vajdaan Shah).

Kashan Admani and Fawad Hai make rookie mistakes as they spread the story in Carma, but you cannot fault the idea, plot and the story’s eventual tie-ups

These people are bad. Period. They have a penchant for the macabre, an affinity for historic torture methods and, of course, a taste for blood. One of them even licks a knife with euphoric zeal as if he is getting a drug-induced high, to show us that this lot is the real deal. Soon Hamza’s finger is cleaved off to prove their point.

Packing the finger in a plastic bag, these very bad people tell Hamza that there is time to get the finger medically reattached…if, that is, Hamza’s wife (Navin Waqar) brings them her family’s virsa (heritage) — a map leading to treasures.

The story jumps back and forth in time, introducing character motives via chapters while laying the groundwork for betrayals, double and even triple crosses. The variety of ‘crosses’ and twists in the plot range from pretty much predictable to somewhat novel, if you compare Carma to Pakistani thrillers (we barely have a handful of examples for comparison).

Admani and Hai do make rookie mistakes as they spread the story, but you cannot fault the idea, plot, and the story’s eventual tie-ups.

Hai’s screenplay drafts a comparably slow first-half that snowballs into an engaging, if too self-explanatory, post-intermission section. Running at an hour and 53 minutes, the cumulative length of the film is too much. The story, even with all of its spiraling shenanigans, can be told effectively without the spoon-fed prolongment we see in its closure.

The spoon-feeding might be necessary for some people, but not its key audience — the ones who watch international, gory thrillers set during moonlit nights.

Another problem is the lack of profanity.

Yes, you read that right; just this once I’m advocating the use of foul language because the sanitisation of tongue ill-fits the menacing, psychopathic tendencies at play throughout Carma.

To quote Tarantino’s filmography: can you imagine Pulp Fiction or Jackie Brown without the bad language? I don’t think so. This is the genre’s — and the story’s — requirement. Also, a film that deals with bad guys, cars and violence doesn’t really cater to the PG-13 crowd. Striking away the profanity causes the film to lose most of its vehement dog-eat-dog intensity.

One can see that Admani and Hai are striving to bring newfangled approaches to the way Pakistani films spin stories. With Carma, they’ve set 90 percent of the film inside cars. Every character’s action in almost every scene — whether in the present or the past — happens from the front or back seat of cars.

It is an inventive break from the norm that brings its own set of technical challenges: the characters have to be lit from inside the cars. Fortunately, with exception to just one or two scenes, the cars are lit just right.

Farhan Golden’s cinematography is, by and large, perfunctory. For a thriller, especially one inspired by Tarantino’s works, there is negligible camera movement. But that is a minor gripe in front of a much more obvious problem: the lead character.

Hamza is an unlikable character who is played to a ‘T’ by Osama Tahir. His life choices are either scrupulous or ruinous, and one can’t help but feel an emotional disengagement because, more often than not, he is not the person he claims to be.

And no, this isn’t a spoiler; you do see Hamza turning into a madman at the very end of the trailer.

The other characters, despite their terrorising nature, appear much more grounded, even if we didn’t know their backstories (we’re shown their pasts nonetheless).

The ensemble cast do their off-kilter characters justice, neither overplaying nor underplaying their distinctive lunatic tendencies. With exception to one scene in the very beginning, the actors do a commendable job of masking their expressions during key moments that could have spilled the beans for the audience.

That is, every actor but one. Adnan Siddiqui, who plays a pivotal role in Carma, all but sleepwalks through his scenes.

Admani, who hails from a music background, pays strict attention to the sound design of the film, whether it is the mapping of the foley or the underscore. While some music loops do sound repetitive during scenes of heightened drama, the sounds’ emphasis and quality help heighten the chilling ambiance in Carma.

Irrespective of shortfalls and minor misleads (eg. for a film set mostly in cars, and has ‘car’ in its title, there is only one car chase), Carma is an engaging thriller where we see bad things happen to very bad people. When you think about this in karmic context, there is some fun in seeing bad people get what they deserve. — MKJ

Released by Eveready Pictures, produced by Dream Station Productions, Carma stars Adnan Siddiqui, Navin Waqar, Zhalay Sarhadi, Osama Tahir, Paras Masroor, Umer Aalam, Arjumand Rahim, Khaled Anam, Lili Caseley, Vajdaan Shah, Emaan Khan and Anum Gauhar. Parents beware: for every shiny car in the film, there are equal amounts of sharp objects, firearms and deadly criminal intentions

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 28th, 2022