/> Starring Aftab Shivdasani, Celina Jaitley, Amrita Arora, Sushant Singh
Directed by Vikram Bhatt
Rating: *

She's a widow, though not the weeping kind. He needs a change of heart, though not in the way you would expect him to.

Aftab Shivdasani, muscles pumped up to the gills, tattoo on forearm and scowl in place, plays a man so out of touch with reality he actually thinks he could woo and bed the widow of the man whose heart has been transplanted into his body.

This is Vikram Bhatt's rather startling attempt at a noire thriller. Can't say why it's called Red unless you're looking at a man who sees red every time the slinky widow passes by. He grabs her. They cuddle and kiss as the camera caresses the contours of their heaving body in search of erogenous convictions.

Bhatt gets a chance to look into lives that are as star- crossed as they are unable to control their primeval urges. True to its noire genre Red is shot mostly in the rain and in dark interiors lit up with a passion-play that's largely supported by Himesh Reshammiya's pounding tracks.

The first - half of this blessedly brief movie moves at a fairly frisky pace. But the nicotined narrative runs out of breath and breadth later on, leaving you looking at a film that's high on moods but pretty low in terms of credibility.

Sushan Singh as a copy investigating a murder hardly gives the plot the hand-up that he's expected to. His two buffoon-like deputies seem straight out of Doordarshan detective thriller.

Bhatt aims for a bizarre kind of eroticism where the characters cease to be people and are instead projected as emblems of greed, lust, melancholy and dark machinations that send them swirling into damnation.

There's just a scattering of characters supporting the lovers at the centre who play a game of hearts and heartlessness with a ruthless ruggedness that makes them as prone to selfdestruction as it makes them impervious to conventional relationships and behaviour.

Tragically the actors fail to rise to the call of the heart's thundering fall. Aftav Shivdasani takes the fall the hardest. The film is almost a showcase for him to display his variety of emotions. Shivdasani goes through the motions from A to B with nothing more to see.

Celina Jaitley as the fidgety femme fatale seems like a shriller more hyper version of Esha Deol in Bhatt's last film Ankahee. Poor Amrita Arora is allowed no space in the narrative forever in search of pace and grace. But the slippery world of lust and treachery lets the characters and finally the film down.

What you see is certainly not what you get in this thriller about two people who deserve each other.

We deserve a lot better.