System Movie Review: Whether it’s fair to assign a gender to a storyteller is a debate that will perhaps linger forever. But Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari stands as a testament to what can unfold when a woman filmmaker
tells stories of and about women, or in the case of System, two women. System is not merely a courtroom drama where opposing counsels lock horns and justice alone is served cold.
Beneath the legal jargon, moral dilemmas and procedural warfare lies a far more intimate exploration of identity, power and perception. This is a film that dares to ask uncomfortable and complex questions. Is winning a case enough proof that justice has truly been served? Is the acquitted always innocent? But System stretches far beyond the confines of the courtroom and what transpires during a trial.
At 2 hours 3 minutes, it deftly juxtaposes two sharply contrasting class structures while delving into the fragile, often fractured nature of a woman’s identity. In doing so, it also touches upon the idea of ‘reverse nepotism’, a phenomenon the internet remains endlessly fascinated by with surprising nuance and emotional intelligence.
The film opens with Neha, a public prosecutor, who’s at present fighting a case pertaining to drug possession and trafficking in the Delhi High Court. She’s the daughter of veteran and celebrated lawyer, Ravi Rajvansh, who runs a law firm, Rajvansh Legal. Why is she not a part of the firm much like her brother, you ask? No, this isn’t about her strong idealistic values.
She’s no Ananya Shroff from Maamla Legal Hai. Well, to be fair, there are certain similarities between them. They both come from a privileged background. Whether System’s Neha rebels against the corporate, money-driven trajectory of her wealthy family isn’t known but unlike Ananya, she very much cribs about the grimy and humid ambience of a government office.
Coming back to System, Neha’s father demands that she hustles and wins ten cases in a row as a public prosecutor and prove her mettle before she can become a partner at Rajvansh Legal. We’re eventually also introduced to Sarika, the court stenographer. A quick pro-tip from her helps Neha win her first case. Impressed by her experience and sharpness, Neha requests Sarika to help her with all her subsequent cases.
Sarika, who belongs to a lower middle-class family, needs the extra money to fund her daughter’s participation in a science fair. The sole breakdwinner of the family, her husband is wheelchair-bound after an accident. With her help, Neha begins winning all her cases until an influencer named Inaaya allegedly kills herself. Neha is assigned this case, which could be a staged murder.
She has to now lock horns with her father, who represents builder Vikram Bajral, the key suspect. What makes things even messier is when Neha’s boyfriend, who works at Rajvansh Legal, is sent to her under the pretext of stealing evidences and research material. On the surface, System is like a family drama infused with interpersonal battles and courtroom exchanges.
But credit goes to Ashwiny to neatly weave all of these themes together and tell a story that doesn’t necessarity hit with immediate force. There are no theatrical, explosive and rehearsed monologues thrown at you. The story simply unfolds with a quiet restraint that gently nudges you into introspection before questions and emotions settle in slowly and persistently. And it’s this apparent simplicity that makes System compelling.
In some scenes, we see Neha sighing as she reads journalistic pieces referring to her as ‘Ravi Rajvansh’s daughter’. Ironically, for Sarika, her unassuming and invisible contour and identity in reference to a man becomes her biggest weapon. Their antithetical existence and sisterhood born out of their contrasting worlds become the very emotional engine powering its narrative.
There are some delicate moments shared by them that will linger. In a scene, when Neha treats her to a chai latte, Sarika instinctively scrunches her face. Later, as their friendship deepens, Sarika takes Neha to a mandi where she picks up pakoras and flowers for her modest home. It’s in these unassuming interactions that System finds its soul. And the simplicity of these moments conveys an intimacy that trasncends class barriers and social conditioning.
System is ultimately driven by these women attempting to reclaim ownership of who they’re beyond the labels imposed upon them. Interestingly and refreshingly, the film handles all of this with remarkable subtlely, choosing to weave it gently into the fabric of the larger plot that prods you to think of our complicated justice system that unknowingly may side with the powerful.
Kudos to Ashwiny because while doing so, she doesn’t reduce the men in the story to convenient, one-note antagonists! They are neither demonised nor written as cardboard cut-outs designed merely to further the film’s politics. Instead, the male characters are afforded the same emotional complexity and humanity as the women – flawed, conflicted, vulnerable.
That nuance is what keeps the narrative grounded, keeping it from slipping into binaries of good versus evil or men versus women. Having said that, one can feel narrative discrepancy between the portrayals of Sarika and Neha’s worlds. While the film invests considerable emotional depth into the intricacies of Sarika’s personal life, the same attention isn’t extended to Neha’s arc.
There is a noticeable imbalance in the writing. In the latter’s case, the narrative merely scratches the surface of her interpersonal conflicts and emotional turmoil instead of probing deeper into the reasons that shape her decisions and vulnerabilities. As a result, her journey feels less emotionally realised than it perhaps intended to be.
By the end of it, you find yourself becoming disproportionately invested in one character, which may not be the most perfect outcome in a film with two parallel leads. And this also gets reflected in the performances. Jyotika as Sarika is the absolute scene-stealer. She sinks her teeth into her character with aplomb, fully immersing herself in Sarika’s quite despair, resolution and simmering dignity.
Whether she’s portraying the crushing weight of caregiving or the emotional fatigue of that one purpose, she brings a rawness and maturity that makes Sarika hard to look away from. Sonakshi Sinha as the confident and unyielding Neha is impressive but the run-of-the-mill graph of her character doesn’t let her rise above the screenplay.
Having said that, she aces in some key moments and you may resonate with her, a woman wanting to call the shots by overcoming the burden of lineage. Ashutosh Gowariker brings authority to Ravi Rajvansh. Adinath Kothare seems to be under-utilised initially but watch out for him as he brings about an interesting twist to the story.
Watch System for its sincere intent, empathic treatment and restraint. Instead of relying on emotional highs, it chooses introspection and silence. Despite its occasional narrative imbalance, it doesn’t lose sight of the emotional truth at its core. It ultimately becomes less about who wins the case and how, and more about who gets to own their narrative in a world constantly trying to write it for them.
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