NH10 Review - A Misogynistic Slasher Movie With A Topical Twist

The title NH10 refers to a highway leading from Delhi to luxury satellite city, Gurgaon, replete with Versace showrooms and Fortune 500 companies, and then further into the lawless backwaters of Haryana, which is where our heroine Meera (Anushka Sharma) spends most of this movie fighting for her life.

Billed as a slasher, NH10 instead belongs to the hillbilly horror sub-genre of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Deliverance, wherein city folk set out for a nice trip to the countryside only to be set upon by inbred rednecks or mutant cannibals, or in this case, men deranged by brutal customs and unchecked power. It’s an especially good genre with which to look at the unevenness of India’s rapid urbanisation. The film starts with Gurgaon skyscrapers and streetlights glinting in the night. By the end we’re in the backwaters of Haryana, the only light is the headlight of the occasional passing car.

The nightmare begins when yuppie husband and wife Arjun (Neil Bhoopalam) and Meera head to a resort outside Gurgaon for a romantic weekend break. Before you can say the hills have eyes they’ve taken a wrong turn, and due to Arjun’s monumental lack of judgment, they find themselves entangled in a so-called “honour killing”. A young couple is brutally murdered in front of them by the bride’s male relatives for marrying against the traditions of their caste. Their deaths, grounded in actual “honour killing” cases, make for the film’s most harrowing sequence.

The killers give chase and Meera and Arjun run for their lives, only not very fast as Arjun has been stabbed and is bleeding profusely. Meera leaves him in what seems to be the safest hiding place and frantically tries to find help but everyone she encounters, including the police, is either complicit in the “honour killing” or unwilling to save her from its perpetrators. Elitism aside, the sheer monotony of almost every poor person being evil really bogs down the narrative. The rest of the film is the resourceful and iron-willed Meera trying to get out alive. The atmosphere is rife with misogyny though that still doesn’t excuse the disappointing and entirely implausible climax that has Meera shifting her focus from survival to revenge.

Before they head out to the city, we’re shown a slice of Meera’s ordinary life. Her car window is smashed in one night while she’s out by herself. The policeman she files a report with asks her husband why he lets her go out alone at night. The next day she’s seen presenting research on the marketing of sanitary towels in a swish conference room, concluding that women feel embarrassed to buy them from male shop owners. Praised for her work, a male colleague says he thinks her boss is kind to her because she’s a woman. Her fateful trip outside the city works less as an actual journey than it does as a metaphor for being a woman in a patriarchal society.