O'Romeo

The Weight of Silence

It is a curious paradox that Vishal Bhardwaj, a filmmaker whose career is defined by the eloquent adaptation of the Bard’s verses into the dusty, blood-soaked vernacular of the Indian hinterland, has stumbled upon a film that speaks too much and says too little. In *O'Romeo*, Bhardwaj attempts to marry the visceral grit of *Mafia Queens of Mumbai* with the operatic tragedy of *Romeo and Juliet*, yet the union feels less like a marriage of true minds and more like an uneasy truce between art-house poetry and the commercial demands of a gangster epic.

The film is not, as the title might mischievously suggest, a direct translation of Shakespeare’s Verona to the Mumbai underworld—Bhardwaj has already walked that path with *Maqbool*, *Omkara*, and *Haider*. Instead, *O'Romeo* is a spiritual successor, borrowing the emotional architecture of doomed love but constructing it with the bricks of Hussain Zaidi’s crime journalism. We follow Hussain Ustara (Shahid Kapoor), a contract killer whose lethal precision with a razor is betrayed by a heart that beats in iambic pentameter.



Visually, the film is a masterclass in atmospheric suffocation. Cinematographer Ben Bernhard paints 1990s Mumbai not as a city of dreams, but as a purgatory of rust and neon. The screen is often bathed in sickly yellows and deep, bruising blues, creating a visual language that mirrors the internal decay of its characters. Bhardwaj’s directorial eye is undeniable in the quiet moments—a game of chess played in the shadow of impending violence, or the way a razor catches the light before it claims a life. These scenes possess a tactile quality; you can almost smell the old paper, the gunpowder, and the rain on the pavement.

However, the narrative collapses under its own ambition when it tries to verbalize this visual poetry. The script, co-written by Bhardwaj and Rohan Narula, oscillates wildly between profound introspection and pulp dialogue. Triptii Dimri, playing the vengeance-seeking Afshan, is given the unenviable task of anchoring a character whose transformation from grieving widow to femme fatale feels rushed, a sketch rather than a portrait.



The heart of the film, and perhaps its saving grace, is Shahid Kapoor. There is a terrifying stillness to his Ustara. He plays the gangster not as a man who enjoys violence, but as a monk who has accepted it as his liturgy. In a scene set within a cinema hall, where a hit is orchestrated against the backdrop of a Bollywood dance number, Kapoor’s face remains a mask of tragic resignation. It is a performance that deserves a better film—one that understands that his silence is more powerful than the script’s soliloquies.

Ultimately, *O'Romeo* feels like a ghost story where the ghost refuses to haunt the right house. It reaches for the grandeur of tragedy but lands in the realm of melodrama. The film is undeniably stylish, and the score—composed by the director himself—haunts the viewer long after the credits roll. But as a cohesive piece of cinema, it is a fractured mosaic. Bhardwaj proves he can still compose a beautiful frame, but in *O'Romeo*, the picture within it remains frustratingly out of focus.