U-Turn Ending Explained: Decoding How Alaya F's Remake Differs From Shraddha Srinath's OG Supernatural Thriller With Its Suspenseful Third Act! (SPOILER ALERT)

U-Turn, the hit Kannada supernatural suspense thriller in 2016 that starred Shraddha Srinath in the lead, has seen quite a few remakes, with the most popular being the Samantha Ruth Prabhu-starrer Tamil-Telugu bilingual that came out in 2018. Now Bollywood, always in the hunt for a movie to remake, has not lost the chance to adapt this thriller in Hindi, so here we have a new U-Turn, starring Alaya F in the lead, along with Aashim Gulati and Priyanshu Painyuli in the supporting cast. U-Turn Movie Review: Alaya F's Remake of Supernatural Thriller Falls Apart When It Takes a 'U-Turn' From the Original.

But there is a twist here. To our surprise, the Hindi U-Turn is not an utterly faithful remake of the original film (unlike the Tamil-Telugu version). The Hindi remake, directed by Arif Khan, takes quite the detour with how it wanted to close the third act and for those who have seen the original, that could be quite a surprise. But before we go ahead and explain what exactly this detour is, and whether it works in the favour of the film or not, let me warn you that the below article is full of MAJOR SPOILERS about U-Turn.

Before we get into the climax, here's the plot summary of U-Turn first...

The movie begins with an accident in Chandigarh that's caused by an irresponsible bike-rider who removed the concrete slabs of the divider of a flyover for a convenient u-turn. The displaced slabs make another incoming vehicle to go turtle and crash, presumably killing its occupant(s).

We then move ahead a year and meet Radhika (Alaya F), a journalist working at a newspaper, who is doing a story on the motorists who removes slabs for taking u-turn on the same flyover. We later learn that Radhika had lost her younger brother in an accident similar to the one shown in the first scene, though it is later revealed that it was not the same accident. Her mother is shown talking to what she believes is the spirit of her son, though Radhika initially dismissed this notion and scolds her for doing so.

Radhika also has a romantic interest in her colleague Adithya (Aashim Gulati), who reciprocates, but her no-strings attached attitude towards relationships doesn't develop their relationship into anything further. One night, Radhika is taken in by police for questioning when a flyover culprit she was supposed to question ends up mysteriously dead, apparently by suicide. When the police, led by Arjun (Priyanshu Painyuli), decide to look into the other culprits whose vehicle numbers Radhika has with her, they find that even they are also dead, again apparently by suicide. While Radhika insists that she is innocent of their deaths, the police gets baffled when one of the victims jumps from his flat on to their jeep just when Arjun was driving it with Radhika by his side. This absolves Radhika of any hand in the murders, though the mystery only deepens further, when two more such flyover culprits are brought into police custody (for their own protection), but one inexplicably kill the other.

From the cops to Radhika, everyone start thinking there is a ghost at play. Radhika believes it is her dead brother and begins to hallucinate him. However, later she realises it is not her brother but someone else who wants these culprits dead. So who or what is the killer?

The Killer in the Original Kannada Film...

... happens to be a ghost! But not of the heroine's brother, but of the lady who was killed in the accident shown in the first scene. While she murders other flyover culprits and stage them like suicide, she is seeking the one responsible for her own death and her daughter's.

In the end, the heroine realises that the bike responsible for their deaths belongs to Aditya, her colleague, however, he tells her that the bike was borrowed that day by someone else. That someone else turns out to be the dead woman's own husband, who didn't realise he was responsible for their deaths. Feeling guilty, he tries to end his life but the ghost saves him as she wants him to live his life repenting for what he did.

The Killer in the Hindi Remake...

... turns out not to be the ghost, but a human! The Hindi remake plays with the supernatural themes, spooks and ghosts, but then brushes all of those aside to go for a 'logical' conclusion. And that logical conclusion ends with someone seeking vengeance for an accident that killed his wife and daughter. Yes, the man who was responsible for the deaths of his wife and child is the killer here seeking the one responsible for their deaths here, while killing other culprits and making them look like suicides driven by something supernatural. So who is the killer?

The Killer and His Modus Operandus

Amarjeet Singh Dhillon (Manu Rishi Chadha), the diabetic cop who keeps vomitting on seeing dead bodies is the one carrying out the killings, and then smartly gaslights his colleagues and even Radhika into thinking something supernatural is behind the deaths. He had forensics experience, so he used a drug called Fear Drug which he sprinkled upon the food and tea of his victims and making them hallucinate and kill themselves. He has been helped by his brother Harry, who is the RTO officer that has been helping out Radhika by providing her the information of all the flyover culprits for her story, but also giving the same info to Amarjeet for him to seek and kill the culprits.

While this deviation from the supernatural twist of the original is interesting, it also opens to quite a few loopholes when you think of it. For one, why does the first victim shown being killed in the film by this drug hallucinate Amarjeet's dead wife and daughter even though he has not seen them? If ghosts weren't real, then why did Radhika hallucinate the spooks and was seeing her dead brother? She also dreamt of seeing Amarjeet's dead wife, though she had never seen her before. Also, who is the entity Radhika's mother is speaking to? Is she like okay?

One more thing unexplained is when Amarjeet tells Radhika that he has been trying to seek justice for those responsible for his family's deaths through law, why is that never recorded. He is a police officer and the death of his spouse should have been in the minds of his colleagues since it only happened a year back, when they began their investigations. Pathaan Ending Explained: How Mid-Credit Scenes Connect Shah Rukh Khan-Deepika Padukone Film to YRF Spy Universe and Troll SRK-Salman Khan Haters.

Anyway, moving ahead to how Radhika and Arjun figure out the truth.

Radhika's suspicions on Amarjeet begins even before the latter kidnaps her in the climax. The reason Amarjeet kidnaps her is because she asks him to do viscera test for the dead victims, which if done, would trace the drug in each one of them. Knowing that if she suggested the same idea to Arjun, he would be in trouble, so Amarjeet kidnapped her with the intention of killing her but not before, like any regular killer in such movies, spilling his modus operandus and reasons for all his killings.

However, here's another thing that we didn't get. Amarjeet thinks that he had poured some of the Fear Drug in Radhika's tea when they were chatting at the dhaba regarding the viscera report. So if he thought so, then why the need to kidnap here? She would have done the deed herself like his other victims. Removing Arjun as an obstacle made sense, since he figured out Harry was the sole connection between Radhika and the killer and he did so when he realised Radhika wasn't killed when she took a deliberate U-turn since she didn't send her vehicle number to Harry.

Anyway, Radhika had already guessed Amarjeet's intentions in giving her tea wasn't good enough since she happen to glimpse upon a bottle of blue liquid among his possession when he spilled them out of his pocket. Without his knowledge, she had switched the cups and it was Amarjeet who ingested the Fear Drug-laced tea accidentally. Later at her home, Radhika searches more about this blue drug and realises it could be the Fear drug, while she is also sent the sale deed of the dead woman's car which she learns that it was in her husband's name, that is Amarjeet's. But she gets kidnapped before she could relay this info to Arjun, whose car gets smashed by a truck driven by Harry.

Before Amarjeet could kill Radhika, the hallucinations caused by the Fear drug begins to take over him, though unlike others, he sees glimpses of his happy times with his wife and his daughter before going to that fateful night that killed them, and he then ends his life by jumping off the building.

So Who Was Responsible for Deaths of Amarjeet's Wife and Child?

The movie wasn't very coy about hiding that person's identity. In the first scene, even if we do not see his face we do hear his voice. And the only person whose voice it resembled was that of Aditya, Radhika's colleague. Before the third act drips in, we are given a better understanding of his involvement when he burns the report of the woman's death after hiding it from Radhika. The final scene which expands upon the first scene reveals it was he who was riding the bike and removing the slabs from the flyover's divider to take a u-turn, that inadvertently killed Amarjeet's family.

However, the irony here is that Radhika, unbeknownst to herself, had a role to play in that accident. It was her call that made him take the u-turn, though whether she learns of this truth ever, remains to be seen. Last we seen them, before the flashback last scene, Radhika and Aditya look to rekindle their relationship while Arjun looks slightly crestfallen over this. If Radhika is a good journalist as she claims to be, let's hope that she finds out that Aditya had been hiding that report from her because he knew he was responsible for two deaths.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 29, 2023 10:17 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).