Anjaam (Consequence) is a 1994 Hindi language Bollywood Film, that has several characteristics of a Lifetime Movie of the Week and a Girls Behind Bars movie.
Shivani (Madhuri Dixit) is a flight attendant for Air India, working First Class on the Mumbai-Dubai route. She has a sister who is married to a greedy gambling addict, who won’t even pay for medicines for his sick wife. On one flight, Shivani meets Vijay Agnihotri (Shahrukh Khan), a rich and spoiled young man who spends the entire flight harassing her and coming on to her. Although she rebuffs him twice and then moves on with her life, Agnihotri starts to obsess about marrying her, even going so far as to convince his doting mother that Shivani will marry him soon.
To his chagrin, Shivani marries an airliner pilot, upon which Vijay concocts a diabolical plan to separate the couple. The plan ends with Shivani’s husband dead and her in prison. Things go From Bad to Worse for Shivani as she is brutalized by the prison’s sadistic warden, forced into sexual slavery and hits her breaking point upon suffering two horrific tragedies.
And then, Shivani decides to take matters into her own hands and avenge herself.
Tropes found here
- Barefoot Captives: All the female prisoners. In India, this is Truth in Television, as all prisoners, both male and female, are kept barefoot for various reasons.
- Berserk Button:
- Shivani’s gets pushed twice. The first time, she loses it in court when Vijay accuses her of fooling around while her husband is fighting for his life in the ICU. Her outburst gets her convicted and incarcerated for assault. She gets pushed again when a brutal beating by the warden causes her to miscarry. She then goes on a revenge-fueled killing spree.
- Vijay goes bonkers and brutally thrashes Shivani when she berates him for stalking her, saying that what he is feeling isn’t love, but lust.
- Best Served Cold: Played with. Shivani initially plans to just burst into Vijay’s house and stab him, but she finds him a helpless paraplegic. Not having it in her to kill him in this state, Shivani helps rehabilitate him back to full use of his limbs - and then tries to kill him.
- Bittersweet Ending: Shivani tries to kill Vijay by pushing him off a cliff. But he pulls her with him and both are dangling from the cliff, with Vijay clutching on to Shivani's leg. Shivani decides that Vijay's death is more important than her life and plunges to her death, taking him with her and completing her revenge.
- Corrupt Cop: Inspector Arjun Singh is on Vijay’s payroll and is implied to have covered up a lot of his transgressions.
- Darker and Edgier:
- Shah Rukh Khan had portrayed the Big Bad before in Baazigar and Darr but both villains had a degree of sympathy. Meanwhile, his character here has no redeemable qualities whatsoever and even his dialogues are deliberately written in such a way that he is more self-absorbed and delusional than ever.
- The ending also shows a realistic outcome of seeking revenge as the protagonist ends up having to kill herself to eliminate the antagonist.
- Darkest Hour: Shivani’s miscarriage, which occurs shortly after her daughter and sister are killed in a car crash.
- Domestic Abuse:
- Shivani’s husband slaps her once to shut her up, which was instigated by her hysterically complaining about him going to work for Vijay Agnihotri’s new airline, as she guesses correctly that it is a ploy for her stalker to get at her again. However, this may have been a case of Poor Communication Kills as Shivani most likely never told her husband about her being stalked.
- Shivani’s brother-in-law is a non-lethal one, as he neglects his wife's and niece's well-being in favor of gambling their money away.
- Death of a Child: Shivani’s daughter dies in a hit-and-run caused by Vijay Agnihotri.
- Depraved Bisexual: The prison warden. She sleeps with Inspector Singh and also molests Shivani.
- The Gambling Addict: Shivani's brother-in-law, Mohan Lal.
- Genre Deconstruction: See Stalking is Love. This is one of the few Bollywood movies which portrays what would happen if a typical 90s Bollywood romantic hero was transported to the real world. He would be a creep and not adorable at all.
- Girls Behind Bars: Shivani is sent to a brutal prison.
- Hellhole Prison: The prison Shivani is sent to has a sadistic female warden who likes to strip inmates naked, beat them and rape them. She also pimps inmates out to visiting politicians, and brutally beats anyone who complains about the conditions there.
- Hypocrite: Vijay brutally bashes Shivani’s husband for slapping her once! Yet barely a few minutes later, he himself is similarly beating Shivani for calling him out on his lust.
- Karmic Death: Mohan Lal, Shivani’s callous brother-in-law who neglected her sister and daughter by making them live near-destitute lives because he’d seize whatever money they had to bet on horse races, is made to choke on money till he dies of asphyxiation.
- Karmic Rape: Shivani inflicts it on the warden as revenge for her own rape by the warden.
- Mutual Kill: Shivani and Vijay both plunge to their deaths when she tries to shove him off a cliff and he pulls her with him, since she decides to kill him even if it means she dies with him.
- Prison Rape: Inflicted on Shivani by the warden. Her cellmate gets dragged away by a visiting politician to be raped as well.
- Rape and Revenge: Shivani rapes and hangs the sadistic female warden who raped her.
- Shameful Strip: Shivani is forced to endure this at the hands of the (female) warden as soon as she arrives at her prison.
- Smoking Hot Sex: Between the Corrupt Cop who framed Shivani and the prison warden.
- Stalking is Love: Averted. Stalking a girl like in 90s Bollywood movies will NOT get her to fall in love with you. Also, Shivani's stalker is not just going to give up his obsession and is likely to escalate.
- Trauma Conga Line: Shivani goes through HELL thanks to Vijay.
- Villains Want Mercy: Mohan Lal, who was cruel and callous to Shivani, her sister, and her daughter, now pleads for forgiveness on the basis that he is Shivani’s brother-in-law.
- Wardens Are Evil: Played straight with the woman overseeing Shivani’s prison.
- Wife-Basher Basher: Subverted. Vijay witnesses Shivani getting slapped by her husband. He then proceeds to beat that husband so brutally, that he is in an ICU clinging to life. He then uses this act to get Shivani to divorce her husband and be with him. Of course, Shivani doesn’t buy it, knowing that the whole scenario was set up by him.
- Wrong Genre Savvy:
- Vijay thinks he is the protagonist in a 90s Bollywood romantic comedy while he is actually the antagonist of a stalker thriller. You can see this in a song where he is "lovingly" stalking Shivani, who is getting increasingly annoyed with his antics.
- Shivani is also expecting her life to turn out similarly to the long-suffering mother in a typical Angry Young Man movie, with the baby boy she is carrying one day growing up to avenge her. It takes a brutal beating and resulting miscarriage for her to understand that no one can avenge her but herself.
- Xenafication: Shivani goes from a meek woman suffering in silence to an unstoppable, vengeance-filled killer.
