‘Bluff’: Carnage with a conscience

“Violence… is her native tongue,” quips blood-thirsty pirate captain Connor (Karl Urban) of Priyanka Chopra Jonas’ Ercell, somewhere in ‘Bluff’s’ labyrinth of arterial spray.

This ethos fashions the film — and not just because Chopra Jonas’ accent sometimes wobbles at the all-you-can-eat buffet of the ambiguous.

Here, brutality is grammar, and Ercell speaks it fluently.

That she houses a dark past under the alias ‘Bloody Mary’, and that she is neither of these women, but one forced into both, lends an unexpected literary undercurrent to what might otherwise drift into slasher shorthand.

It is 1846; sun setting on the pirate age. On the sun-bleached shores of the emancipated British colony of Cayman Brac, Ercell lives as a fishwife in a plastered-over utopia, its residents dutifully deferential to colonial masters.

She shares her salt-stung life with TH Bodden (Ismael Cruz Cordova), their son Isaac (Vedanten Naidoo), and a reluctant sister-in-law, Elizabeth (Safia Oakley-Green), who withholds the word “sister” like a ration.

But Bloody Mary was a swashbuckling pirate who once sailed under Connor’s tutelage before stealing his gold and vanishing into domestic anonymity.

Mohawk braid slicing the wind, she was “twice the captain” he ever was. The bounty on her head is well earned; she slit, blasted and shot with the poise of someone long fluent in ruin.

An indentured servant “rescued” by coloniser Connor, she was fashioned into a weapon, then mythologised.

After an almost painted image — white saree thrown over colonial garb — the past washes ashore: Connor storms the island, her husband kidnapped by him, hunting his stolen treasure. Not just the gold, but the woman he once “saved” and was infatuated with.

Her mohawk now tamed into sensible homeliness, Ercell learns that old habits die hard.

Daggers and firearms return to her hands with familiar finesse. This time to single-handedly save her family from pirates who swarm in from every corner of the frame, clamouring for the blade — and a swift forwarding address to hell.

Most of this detonates in the first quarter. The rest houses little story but brims with gore — not mindless, though; the keep-you-on-your-toes kind.

Chopra Jonas wears Ercell with the gleam and vigour of a mother who refuses to yield, while honouring her morose past — perhaps more than the script is written to contain. It is a recurring frustration in her Hollywood chapter: her roles rarely match the extraordinary thespian she is.

Ercell’s ferocity is not feigned. The fight sequences — which dominate the film — are oddly less compelling than perhaps a fleeting look: half worry, half fury, as she hears a distressed shriek from kin.

Urban’s Connor carries smoky masculinity with restraint, sprinkling in vulnerability as his hunger for Ercell reveals itself.

Crucially, the film never leans too heavily on their equation. She admits that she “did what she had to do”, sidestepping the tired reflex of forced sexual tension.

‘Bluff’ may not be the critics’ darling, nor cinema for the history books — dialogue veers between pretentious and oddly modern, and the grand mise-en-scene feels almost blasphemous for a straight-to-OTT outing.

Yet, beneath its jubilant flinging of blood runs a stubborn, earnest mother’s story, insistent and unblinking.

You won’t relax. You’ll brace. And by the end, you’ll have exhausted every gasp you brought with you.