Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cuttputlli’ on Hulu, a Strangely Hilarious and Violent Hindi Serial Killer Thriller

Now on Hulu, loony serial-killer thriller Cuttputlli (translation: Puppet) is a Hindi-language remake of the 2018 Tamil/Kollywood film Ratsasan (translation: Demon), about a wannabe filmmaker who becomes a cop and ends up tracking a series of gruesome murders. “Loony” doesn’t even begin to describe Cuttputlli, which smooshes together tones and genres willy-nilly and throws in a bonkers musical-dance sequence at the halfway point, a component of Indian cinema I’m not sure I’ll ever acclimate to (which might be a good thing). Love or hate this movie, you can’t say it isn’t entertaining.

CUTTPUTLLI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Arjan Sethi (Akshay Kumar) has a Wall o’ Serial Killers in his apartment. You know – news clippings, photos and artifacts of brutality that no sane person would want to see first thing and last thing every day. His latest addition to the lovely murder collage is an article about a teenage girl’s slaying, complete with a photo of the corpse’s face, slashed up with an eye gouged out. Can they even put photos like that in newspapers? Jeezoman. Oof. There’s a good reason for Arjan’s obsession: He’s written a thriller screenplay and is shopping it around to producers. One wants him to rewrite it as a comedy. Another says, “Let’s avoid the murder angle. Why don’t you add some wholesome family emotion?” and Arjan immediately gets up and walks out. As he should.

With his filmmaking prospects quickly fading and his bank account dwindling, Arjan decides to follow in his late father’s footsteps and become a cop in the mountain town of Kasauli. He participates in a montage where he runs and jumps on obstacle courses and whatnot, followed by a graduation ceremony. His first day on the job, he’s ordered to use a baton to beat a confession out of a suspect, and is chastised by his boss (Sargun Mehta) when he acts like a normal compassionate human being and blanches at such sadistic violence. Meanwhile, we see a teenage girl lured to a person in a blue van. She’s SNATCH’D and in her stead is a gift box with a doll’s head inside, its face cut up and its eye gouged out.

Hmm. Are you connecting the dots here? Arjan definitely is, but the other cops aren’t – other cops who haven’t spent years staring at pictures of mutilated bodies and memorizing John Wayne Gacy’s favorite snack foods or whatever. So Arjan is outed as an expert on relevant subject matter, and goes from being a total wuss who won’t even torture people to the lead inspector on a high-profile serial killer case. Arjan isn’t a total weirdo, however – we see him bend over to tie a pregnant woman’s shoelace, like a total sweetheart. He also dotes on his niece, and through her he meets Divya (Rakul Preet Singh), a real looker of a schoolteacher who inspires slo-mo shots and rom-com music right smack in the middle of a movie about gruesome slaughter and the unknowable dark nature of humanity. Meanwhile, Arjan’s niece ends up in a different school with a math teacher who’s quite the ultracreep, a real bag of donkey turds who physically and psychologically abuses his students. Could he be the serial killer? NO SPOILERS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Cuttputlli is like Seven (or maybe more accurately a second/third-tier 1990s thriller like The Bone Collector or Kiss the Girls) if it was a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker production. Call it The Kentucky Fried Serial Killer Movie!

Performance Worth Watching: Kumar is a Hindi-film veteran who does his best with a bland character and jumps through this screenplay’s increasingly ludicrous hoops like a true pro.

Memorable Dialogue: This is what passes for flirtatious dialogue in Cuttputlli (although there might be something lost in translation):

Arjan: Can I get you a drink? Soft drink?

Divya: I don’t drink soft.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Considering how the Arjan character is given dubious “advice” about inserting comedy and family-friendly crud into his hardcore-murder movie script and then finds himself in a movie with comedy and family-friendly crud haphazardly crammed into it, I’m not 100 percent certain Cuttputlli isn’t a full-on spoof of the serial-killer genre. It’s all but impossible to take seriously, evident by: The comical idiocy of the police. The musical sequence that makes Kumar look like Pitbull. The towering pile of plot contrivances. The OTT-absurd killer, who makes a Scooby-Doo villain look like Norman Bates. The big final chase and confrontation, which reaches a level of hysteria that must be the result of derangement, genius or a combination of both.

Whether the comedy is intentional or not is beside the point. Laughter is inevitable. The plot is chock-full of twists and red herrings, all telegraphed way ahead of time. The film’s portrayal of violence is so bizarre – grisly closeups of maimed children, casual police brutality, Arjan kicking a suspect in the testicles over and over and over again – it’s either cluelessly tasteless or deeply parodic. Is Cuttputlli a satire of police ineptitude? Our fascination with violence and exploitation in movies? A weary and worn-out genre? It has to be. Has to be.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Intent is wholly beside the point – Cuttputlli is weird and outrageous.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.