In Konkona Sen Sharma’s Accused, MeToo becomes a narrative prop to pardon its terrible central character of any real consequence

There is no sin in ambition. There is no sin in a film that moves like its protagonist, shifting, fragmenting, throwing new shapes at you, leaving you grasping for truths that may not yet be known. But there is a different kind of failure in an ambition that stops short, in a tone that evolves only to settle abruptly on its most discordant beats, in  interrogating your protagonist, only to grant her a clean slate without consequence. Above all, there is a particular failure in promising a deeper reckoning with a MeToo story, only to wield the movement as a crutch for the narrative, never truly grappling with its complexities. It feels dissonant, almost borderline frustrating, to watch a story of a pedestrian false accusation unfold in a world where the merit of the movement is constantly questioned, where suspicion is cast upon the voices of survivors, and where no solid legal scaffolding exists to support them.

Konkona Sen Sharma plays a highly flawed surgeon in Accused, a character granted far too easy a pass and far too neat a resolution by the script.

It is only somewhere towards the last hour that the realisation arrives, that the movement was never the destination, only a means of mutation, a device leaned upon. Kashyap was always circling something else: the anatomy of power, how it arranges itself in corridors and in bedrooms, in hierarchies both professional and personal. So, when you look at Geetika (Konkona Sen Sharma), the charge against her begins to feel almost secondary. She may not be guilty in the way the allegation frames her, yet what she enacts elsewhere is no less troubling. Power courses through her interactions, in the workplace, with interns and colleagues, authority slips into intimidation. In her marriage to Meera (Pratibha Ranta), affection is threaded with dominance. It is telling how your own gaze shifts as the story evolves. As what registers initially as ambition begins to tilt towards arrogance; what appears as discipline begins to feel like unkindness.

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But then again, there is one thing in crafting an unlikeable protagonist, and quite another in labouring to secure her sympathy, in extending to her a grace she has not earned, a reprieve untouched by consequence.  Much of the film unfolds as spectacle of fallout. We are made to witness how society turns upon Geetika once the charges surface; how she becomes the object of merciless trolling, of public suspicion, of that slow social exile that damages reputation. Her relationship collapses piece by piece; her professional standing erodes. The film screams here, attentive to the cruelty of collective judgment, sketching what feels like a commentary on cancel culture and its appetite for ruin. Yet the discomfort lies elsewhere.

Geetika is never shown grappling with herself. She does not meaningfully confront the ways she has wielded power: how ungenerous she has been to her partner, how exacting, even dismissive, she has been with colleagues. Even in its bid for transformation, the film defaults to the safest of contrivances: a trembling, tear-soaked climactic monologue offered as moral currency, as though it were sufficient to settle the debt of accountability. When empathy is then solicited for her, it feels less like moral complexity and more like narrative insistence. And in that insistence, one cannot help but recall the lineage of men who have lately dominated our screens, those alpha, bearded figures who act on impulse, who wound in the name of desire, who mistake possession for love, violence for passion, only to be rewarded with redemption and happy endings. The gender changes; the indulgence does not.