Nepal’s ‘Pooja, Sir’ is a vital social drama in the body of a crime thriller

Assisting Pooja is local cop Amar (Bijay Baral), a dark-skinned man who detests being mistaken for Madhesi, and a novice Madhesi policewoman, Mamata (Nikita Chandak), who firmly believes Pooja will look out for her, given their common experience as women in law enforcement. Unfortunately for Mamata, Pooja's discomfort with her gender also manifests as a rejection of femininity—and of other women on the force—and the fact that Mamata is Madhesi doesn't mean Pooja inherently understands her plight, despite facing discrimination herself.

These character specifics are almost never the movie's central focus, but rather, they hover over every scene, waiting to be yanked into focus by some stray microaggression as the case unfolds. Rauniyar—who belongs to the Madhesi community himself—paints a picture of a country where these anxieties are ever-present, even when the related protests aren't on screen.

When these demonstrations do appear, Pooja, Sir weaves them into the plot in clever ways that threaten to derail the investigation. At times, it's up to Pooja and her colleagues to navigate protesters chanting anti-police slogans if they want to catch up to the culprits—but these crowds are never true antagonists. While they pose a physical threat, Rauniyar always paints them with an empathetic brush, even though his camera is focused on Pooja. One wrong move from her, or one comment out of place, could incite a small riot, but enough by way of news broadcasts and protest signage makes the objectives of these masses clear. All they want is safety and justice from a state that brutalizes them with impunity, and while Pooja might take a more measured approach than most cops, she's still part of an oppressive system, and therefore, must tread lightly.

The challenge with a film like Pooja, Sir is keeping the background in focus—which is to say, clarifying the political backdrop, while also keeping dozens to hundreds of extras in mind while telling a story through the eyes of their oppressors. But even this narrative structure was born from personal experience. Rauniyar developed the concept as a way to dramatize his relationship with Magrati, who, not belonging to the Madhesi minority, had to learn the intricacies of his daily oppression while they dated. However, the film is the furthest thing from a re-creation of its director’s personal life, and instead fills the corners of an otherwise standard crime thriller with questions about how such a familiar genre story might be wound and bent by Nepalese cultural specifics.

If the film falters on occasion, it's because it skips a few plot beats here and there—information about the case, about who's responsible for the kidnapping, and how the cops went from evidence A to conclusion B—but this hardly kneecaps the story. It's an understandable trade-off, given the movie's troubled production: Magrati was diagnosed with three different kinds of cancer just before making the film, and they lost funding from several grants and investors due to fears about whether or not the film could be completed. Pooja, Sir, therefore, appears to have a few scenes missing, which may have further engrossed viewers in its kidnapping plot. However, the developments therein are usually explained in dialogue. The movie does not, on the other hand, sacrifice its more important dramatic scenes, of characters self-reflecting in isolation, or responding to the ongoing political turmoil.

This is, in microcosm, why "Pooja, Sir" strikes a chord: it frames individual character struggles as notes in a larger symphony.

Just as vital are the moments that center the question of Pooja's identity as a queer woman with nominally good intentions. Many of the people around her are corrupt, so she carries herself with a no-nonsense attitude—Magrati is magnificent in the role, approaching it with poise and purpose—but the character’s actions can't help but be weighed against what she passively permits, and the forms of corruption in which she remains silently complicit. Being handed a list of suspects to pursue certainly gets her one step closer to solving the mystery, but that she chooses to ignore the partisan nature of this list—its names are mostly demonstrators and political opponents—calls Pooja's methodologies into question.

The film's intentional struggle between straightforward thriller and class- and caste-conscious drama becomes increasingly apparent as new dimensions to the case arise. All the while, Rauniyar and cinematographer Sheldon Chau dirty the frame with out-of-focus elements and maintain a riveting visual energy through intimate moments, amid even the most crowded and chaotic scenes. This is, in microcosm, why Pooja, Sir strikes a chord: it frames individual character struggles as notes in a larger symphony. And it does this while crafting a cautionary tale about how concepts like equality, diversity, and feminist progress can so easily be stripped of their core tenets, and co-opted by harmful power structures to step on the necks of other marginalized groups. That it manages to be an enticing genre thriller too is the icing on the cake.