Dasru (Manoj Bajpayee) is a worrier. When his wife Vaano (Tannishtha Chatterjee) tells him that she wishes to build a hammock using a saree inside their makeshift residence at a construction site in Mumbai where they both work as labourers, Dasru warns her she'll crash into the tin walls.When someone recognises his tribal tattoos and asks him where he hails from, he finds himself hesitating while answering. Dasru is a suspect in the murder of Vaano and the investigating officer (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) assures him that nothing will happen to him if he’s innocent. “Can you guarantee it?” Dasru asks him, only to get a response saying, “I’ll try my best.” They both know how this will end, and that’s how Dasru – by being a worrier – lives another day in the [seemingly] wild, wild west.

Joram, Devashish Makhija’s fourth directorial feature, fashions a grim political drama as a Western thriller. Mostly set in a mineral-rich village occupied by tribals in Jharkhand, the film takes place at the intersection of land-grabbing corporates propped up by local governments, patronising middle-men, violent rebel forces, and common folk engulfed and overwhelmed by them all. In a key scene, Dasru confronts a police informant, who pleads for his life by saying, “If we don’t help the police, we’re labelled ‘Naxal sympathisers' and thrown in jail. If we don’t help the rebel forces, they hang us upside down for being bootlickers. We’re screwed from both sides.”

In a film that relies on Piyush Puty’s marked-with-character visuals – like transmission towers in the middle of nowhere – allowing viewers to feel rather than be told, the conversations (written by Makhija) are stinging. “Why is no one fighting anymore?” bemoans Dasru, only to be told that fighting feeds the soul, but doesn’t do much for the stomach. When Dasru is asked about why he ran away, he objects, saying he ran away from the gun, not the village [Dasru was a Naxal militant, before escaping to Mumbai]. When a Mumbai cop asks a constable in Jharkhand how they “communicate” without proper mobile coverage in the rural areas, the constable responds “Adjust kar lete hai, sir [We try to adjust, sir]", his face telling a million unspoken tales.

Joram, named after Dasru’s three-month-old baby who is tied to his back as they’re on the run, kicks off during a chance encounter in Mumbai when a tribal minister from Jharkhand – Phulo Karma (Smita Tambe, with a distressing stare) – is distributing sarees and she recognises Dasru. He’s grown his hair and changed his name [he calls himself Bala in Mumbai], but Karma has the knowing eyes of a predator having spotted her next kill. Staging Vaano’s murder and implicating Dasru for it, Karma ensures Dasru’s face is circulating on social media in no time.

Being socio-political critiques, there’s always an overwhelming unpleasantness in Makhija’s films. Especially how he never pulls his punches while depicting bad behaviour. Remember when he showed the villain in Ajji raping a mannequin, with his barely human qualities? The writer-director seems to have rectified that by rooting Joram’s antagonist in grief. Phulo Karma is driven by revenge; loneliness fuels her quest to kill Dasru. Makhija establishes this with two brisk scenes, when Karma wakes up from a nightmare, and when she asks a subordinate to eat with her.

In many ways, the conscience of Joram is Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub’s Ratnakar Bagul. Ayyub never overplays his hand as the upright, honest cop — navigating a jungle of superiors, politicians with vested interests, subordinates putting their lives at risk for him, realising getting out of the web he’s being sucked into will need all of his quiet resolve. There’s an ease with which Ratnakar excuses himself from vile celebrations, setting locked-up minors free, and the way he keeps telling the local cops to ‘not shoot’, despite being given orders to kill Dasru, rather than capture him alive.

Makhija’s films (Ajji, Bhonsle) have always felt righteous in their anger, by getting protagonists to avenge the system’s deficiencies in his films’ climax. In Joram, it almost feels like the director might be losing hope in revisionist/fantastical endings, when someone comes and sets things right (on however small a scale). It appears like the filmmaker has made his peace with society [and by extension the film ecosystem for independent filmmakers like him] being beyond help. No amount of initiative, however extraordinary, will displace the rich and powerful, while the downtrodden continue to be dehumanised. Meanwhile, after Joram, Devashish Makhija lives another day to tell (at least) one more story.

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