A Full 19 Reasons Why Carreng Gang Is A Better Gangster Movie Than The Irishman

This article was originally published on Yetiyap.com.

Nepali filmmakers have made fair attempts at a great variety of film genres, from horror movies to even sci-fi. When it comes to gangster movies, though, none can surpass the genius storytelling of Carreng Gang, an iconic cinematic showpiece that will keep you guessing until the very end.

Carreng Gang keeps the visitors busy with a colorful cast of characters, which include a literal toddler as the main mastermind behind the film. Alongside that, it features a dense plot that takes more effort than Tenet or Interstellar to crack. So, here are 19 reasons why Carreng Gang is a better gangster movie than The Irishman.

Character Introduction

The biggest nail that holds Carreng Gang together is its motley group of characters, who range from a two-foot-tall child gangster to a yawning bear. Here’s a brief overview of the main characters.

The Fuche Gangster

The main attraction of the movie. Seriously, everything about this kid is perfect — his hairstyle, his twisted sunglasses, to his evil swag. This kid may speak like a toddler (literally, he has that baby accent), but he’s a hellspawn that betrays and kills people left and right.

The Carreng Gang Leader

Meanwhile, the titular Carreng Gang is led by a guy who is four feet tall and has successfully weaponized his short-man aggressiveness. This man is so insecure about his height, that even the cameras are well-aware of it — 99.9% of the shots featuring the gang leader use close-up shots, or extreme low-angle shots.

The Yawning Bear

An absolute unit, and the second in command to the leader of Carreng Gang. This man likes to speak in a particularly dopey voice and has the unfortunate character quirk of screaming and/or yawning with his mouth fully open. We really don’t know what that’s about.

Kalu Baba

Kalu Baba is not one person, but rather two. One named Kalu, and the other named baba. This pair is extremely fond of oversized, outdated sunglasses and also quite adept at hiding in trees. No, literally. They use it for tactical advantage at least two times in the film.

The Omniscient Policeman

You cannot have a gangster movie without a policeman in the fray. In the case of Carreng Gang, the policeman is a lean guy who just shows up without explanation and randomly stumbles onto gang meetings. More on that later.

The Murderous Aunty Who Is Also A Superhuman

Her name is murderous aunty. Someone killed her brother. Now she will chase Kalu Baba for hours to get her revenge. She just suddenly shows up at one point and eats up a lot of screen time chasing Kalu Baba and reminiscing about her dead brother.

Rajnikanth from Daraz

Every so often, Hollywood films feature cameos from celebrated artists that steal the show. Carreng Gang has a similar scene from a cameo from Nepali Rajnikanth, who likes to do tricks with cigarettes.

Throughout the duration of his scene, he laughs like an absolute demon before being murdered by Kalu Baba. The sheer chaotic energy that he conjures on scene makes him a fine candidate for the Joker, if we ever made a Nepali Batman film.

The Cinematic Broadstrokes

So, what makes Carreng Gang stand out from other gangster movies? Well, this film crafts a unique identity for itself from the get-go by using very specific cinematic techniques.

Nostalgic Cinematic Effects

Carreng Gang makes full use of bygone techniques to build tension and set the mood, such as dramatic zooms, badass repetitions, and the like. The funniest thing is that these techniques are about the only thing the film is good at. Most of the other cues are really misplaced and only serve to confuse the viewer.

Supremely Wooden Dialogue

The off-kilter dialogue delivery is literally everywhere in this film, and can severely confuse the viewer. It’s even worse early on, with some characters speaking in total monotone and with a poker face.

Voices Stuck In Badass Mode

The characters’ voices seem to be stuck perpetually in badass mode, even to the extent of interfering in free communication. This can be seen in Yawning Bear, who has to take a deep asthmatic breath after every four words, or in Baba, who speaks in a breathy voice reminiscent of a Karan Johar romance movie from the 00’s.

This is also a good time to plug in the very first lines of dialogue you hear in this film:

The Forest As A Character

The city as a character. It’s a common technique employed by art movies, when they want to add a lot of feel onto the storytelling by bringing the setting of the story to the forefront. This works out pretty well usually because the setting has a lot to do with how a movie feels.

Something similar is going on with Carren Gang if you look closely. All gang fights and secret meetings have to happen at Raniban. Kalu Baba even sleep in the forest:

Meanwhile, all tabletop meetings take place in this very specific restaurant that is surrounded by jastaa paata. You see this restaurant from various different angles, but it doesn’t take too much to figure out that it's all the same place.

Things Just Happen

Literally every scene and character is set up in a masterful way so as to inflict maximum confusion upon the audience. Things just happen, scenes just start, people just run into each other, and important characters are suddenly there in the movie.

C-Grade Cinematic Violence Is Violent

You don’t go into a movie like Carreng Gang expecting realistic, blood-curdling violence. All the same, it is definitely strange how the filmmakers seek to inflict a kind of gruesome quality even in their low-budget cinematic violence.

Child Endangerment Is Good Business

The action film Pari can potentially raise questions about child exploitation. Carreng Gang, on the other hand, has a scene that would outright get it banned abroad, and its makers arrested.

You see, Fuche Gangster is a fan of the martial arts and can often be seen practicing his chops. It takes some extreme turns though. Just check this out:

Yep, the filmmakers just straight-up lit a kid on fire. Literally.

Exposition All The Way To The End

Carreng Gang is a two-hour trip built to shock and confuse. At any given point, audience members are scrambling to understand what is going on in the screen.

Around midway, you realize that this impact is further compounded by a plot that keeps getting more and more confusing. New plot points keep getting added in each next dialogue scene. You just lose track of all these plot threads eventually.

Flashbacks All The Way To The End

This is just another part of what makes Carren Gang so complicated. Remember Murderous Aunty? Well, it takes until the very end for the viewer, and honestly even the film’s characters to know what her role is in all this gang trouble. Until then, she spends most of her time remembering her family in tiny snippets of her home life. This goes on until the very final quarter of the movie.

The Sequel To A Non-Existent Movie

While the movie gets more and more confusing over time, Carreng Gang actually starts with a very big question. It starts with a two-minute montage of various incidents that appear to allude to a previous movie. The actual film starts with a “Chha Mahina Pachi” notice.

The viewer, in 2021, has no earthly way of knowing whether the movie is a sequel. Nor does he understand the events shown in the beginning montage. At the very climax, our two-foot sociopath reveals that all the events of the movie go back to that montage, which a viewer has no way of understanding.

The Karna Kawach

Two characters in the film are supposed to be dead from a shooting, but end up being quite alive. The reason? Well, they were wearing bulletproof vests. That they didn’t know about. And they somehow magically appeared underneath their regular clothes.

The Climax To End All Climaxes

In the end, all the main characters in the film just randomly happen to come across each other. Slowly, all the different plot points connect with each other. Somehow, the final equation puts Fuche Gangster against literally everyone else. How? We don’t know. Might need a few more viewings for that one.

Ultimately, it takes three grown men and a murderous aunty to kill this demonchild. They strangulate this poor gangster kid to death in a needlessly graphic scene — after the kid survives a literal bomb blast.

If you were wondering, the kid gangster is being held by Kalu Baba and Murderous Aunty, and strangled by the leader of Carreng Gang. Kalu Baba actually killed Murderous Aunty’s brother! What the hell are they doing teaming up??

Once that is done, the four characters decide to bury the kid right then and there for some inscrutable reason. Truly a bizarre end to an equally confusing movie!