Inside the corner room in screenwriter-producer Fawad Hai’s house, a comfy swivel chair looks up at a stack of preview monitors, where a version of Carma waits ready for preview, weeks before the film’s release.

Imposing black sound speakers, connected to mixers and midi-keyboards, stand around the chair like 15th century guards, as if overlooking a convict whose head is about to be cut off. Below them lie a cluster of power cables and extension boxes that all but cover one end of the room.

This somewhat claustrophobic room is calibrated to deliver an immersive sound experience, Kashan Admani, producer and director of Carma, tells me, apologising for the mess. But that doesn’t stop one’s hyperactive imagination from racing to illogical conclusions.

If I don’t like the film, I imagine, and if an inquiry came my way about what my opinion is, it would be a miracle to escape the house without colliding with speakers, or tripping over the coffee table that sits right next to my swiveling seat.

‘Carma is a new-age revenge thriller where every character gets what’s coming to them. Whatever happens to them is the cause of their own actions’

We joke about it as I peek at the adjoining passageway separated by a sliding glass door, where more editing systems sit on what looks like a dining table. There sit bored editors and assistants, while their machines crunch megabytes trying to render a copy of the film for the censor boards and cinema projectors.

Yes, escape would be next to impossible. Thank God then that Carma turns out to be better than its trailer.

Carma’s post-production has been done entirely in this temporary setup, I’m informed. Kashan’s own audio studio — he is a well-known name in the music fraternity — was quite a bit better I’ve heard, before it was submerged in rainwater in 2020. The incident, devastating as it was, somehow compelled Kashan to shift gears from music production to filmmaking, he tells Icon.

Set mostly inside cars, Carma is a play on the words ‘karma’ and ‘cars’. The words just clicked, Fawad says. “All we had to do was replace the ‘K’ with a ‘C’.”

The title hints at the karmic cycle of cause and effect, Fawad continues. “Carma is a new-age revenge thriller, where every character gets what’s coming to them. Whatever happens to them is the cause of their own actions.”

Rather than keep it simple, the duo added every newfangled idea that lent itself to the story. The film not only has flashbacks but flashforwards as well, Fawad points out.

Inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s works, Carma is broken into chapters that tell a specific segment of a particular character’s story. However, Tarantino isn’t the only inspiration, Kashan says. The debuting director also lists Guy Ritchie and Ridley Scott as sources who trigger his imagination.

“I have been exploring ideas for years, but I wasn’t convinced by any of them,” he states. “It was during Covid-19 that I got the idea about making a movie about car kidnappings — a crime that is very common in Karachi.”

The idea turned into an unconventional, dark story about unconventional, dark characters.

Navin Waqar, who plays Maria, the lead character’s wife in Carma, joins us a little while after the film ends.

Maria is a complex character, and the appeal of its intricacy drew the actress to the role, she tells Icon.

Inspired by Quentin Tarantino’s works, Carma is broken into chapters that tell a specific segment of a particular character’s story. However, Tarantino isn’t the only inspiration, Kashan says. The debuting director also lists Guy Ritchie and Ridley Scott as sources who trigger his imagination.

“Maria isn’t your average, stereotypical woman. She has an edge to her and cannot be slapped a label on, or confined inside a box,” Navin begins. “She’s not all good, and not all bad. There’s a charm to her and a mystery, because she is not a ‘goody two shoes’ who reacts with either misery or love — the two emotions we’re normally accustomed to seeing on screen.”

Navin calls Carma an “original” with a “very twisted, blink-and-you’ll-miss plot.”

Zhalay Sarhadi, who sent a voice note from the US, concurs.

Zhalay plays the leader of the gang of kidnappers, and wants people to sit down and think about the story after the credits roll.

“[Pakistani movies have] a plain and simple narrative, and we tend to spoonfeed everything to the audience. I think its high time we let the audience come to a conclusion by themselves,” she affirms.

A fan of Tarantino and thrillers, Carma immediately rang the bell for Zhalay. “It was like I manifested this particular project into being,” she says. “I was absolutely floored when I got the script because women don’t get opportunities to do something like this in Pakistan.”

“Forget women,” she adds in the same breath. “You don’t get opportunities for anyone, because these things aren’t attempted.”

For the record, this is not Zhalay’s first foray into edgy thrillers that run deep into the night. Back in 2015, she acted in Jalaibee; that too was a stylistic thriller. Her character in Carma is quite different, though.

“[For Carma], we all created Sasha,” she says. “[In fact], we all created every character on the set because the script can only take you so far,” she explains.

Paras Masroor, who plays Hashmat, one of Sasha’s independent-minded hoods, seconds the notion.

“Hashmat is a complex character in a collection of complex characters,” Paras points out. “He is cold-blooded but has a romantic heart that’s hidden somewhere in his complicated nature.

“I do my research and develop the character as realistically as possible. But I don’t take direct references,” Paras tells me as we talk about influences. The way the character walks, talks, even thinks and reacts, all come from the actor, he says.

By luck, Paras, who has long mangy hair, looked the part when the film was offered to him. “As if by ‘karma’, the things that were right for the project just fell into place,” he muses.

The film was shot almost linearly, and that helped with his character’s progression, Osama Tahir, the film’s lead actor, tells me on the phone a few days later.

“About 85 to 90 percent was shot in sequence. So, as we were performing it, I asked Kashan if there was an allowance for improvisation.”

Osama’s inclination was to add an element of extreme to the character in almost every action he undertakes, the actor explains. The tendency for extremes added a tricky edge to a character that was already tricky to play in the first place.

Hamza is a UK-returned man whose past includes a girlfriend (Lili Caseley) and a dead dad (Adnan Siddiqui, in an extended cameo) who taught him to drive like a bat out of hell. Things, though, turn out to be much more complicated when Hamza becomes the psychopathic gang’s target.

“I wouldn’t call Hamza conniving, but he is somebody who really wants to have his vengeance. He has to sacrifice literally every aspect of his world to make things right, so that he can satisfy his heart,” he explains.

“Carma is not necessarily about bad people, but it is about bad circumstances [and how drastic change of events] can influence people to do things that may not be considered right,” Kashan justifies when we speak days after the preview.

“For me, making a film is not about playing safe. I wanted to make a film that would depict reality, and reflect true human emotions and behaviour,” he says.

In their world, Kashan, Fawad and the cast create realistic emotions that only manifest themselves in the worst of circumstances. Although heightened by stylised storytelling, which includes a lot of bloodshed, bullets and blades. Iin hindsight, you can’t disagree with the notion.

Carma plays in cinema from September 2

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 28th, 2022