Dhurandhar

The Weight of Silence

I’m still not sure whether Aditya Dhar is making movies or manufacturing ordnance. *Dhurandhar* is a 212-minute espionage epic that hits with the force of heavy artillery, and yet its technical control is hard to deny. Most of it unfolds in the bruised, dusty maze of Karachi’s Lyari district, where an Indian operative works deep undercover to break the ties between the ISI and the underworld. Dhar has no interest in smooth, tuxedoed spy fantasy. He wants grime, sweat, and the slow, miserable pressure of people lying to each other in tight rooms.



The film’s politics are blunt to the point of aggression. After *Uri*, Dhar clearly feels no need to soften his brand of hard-line nationalism, and there are stretches where the movie seems ready to halt the story just to jab a finger in the audience’s chest. The most uncomfortable example is his decision to weave real audio from the 26/11 attacks into a fictionalized sequence. That collision between actual trauma and mass entertainment is hard to shrug off. I found myself recoiling a bit, not because the material lacks force, but because the force feels calculated. A critic at *The Wire* put it well: "Dhar is a competent director, but he's also insidiously crafty while inciting anger." That sentence hangs over the whole film.

And still, for all my misgivings about the movie’s ideological battering ram, I couldn’t deny the pull of the performance at its center. Ranveer Singh plays Hamza as a man slowly sanding himself down to survive. Usually Singh arrives as a burst of volume and color. Here he works by subtraction. Watch him serving tea to gangsters: the shoulders dipped just enough to read as subservient, the neck still too rigid to forget the soldier underneath. It’s an intensely physical performance, all self-erasure and contained panic. Sucharita Tyagi was right to call it a career-best turn, saying it shows "why he is one of the most watchable serious, dramatic actors in Hindi cinema, when he decides to take his craft and abilities seriously."



There’s a scene in the second hour that explains the movie’s method better than any speech could. Hamza sits across from Rehman, the local boss played by Akshaye Khanna with terrifying calm. Dhar locks the camera down. No score, no flashy cutting—just the ceiling fan, the scrape of crockery, and a story about a dog that’s really a test of loyalty. The camera stays interested in Hamza’s hands, especially the thumb tracing his holster under the table, while Khanna barely blinks. It’s pure pressure. (R. Madhavan also makes a strong impression as the bespectacled IB chief directing events from Delhi; after so many affable roles, seeing him order killings with bureaucratic irritation is genuinely unsettling.)



When the violence erupts, Dhar shoots it without grace. Fists land badly. Bodies slip. Guns jam. It feels less choreographed than endured, as if a documentary crew wandered into the wrong alley at the wrong time. That ugliness gives the action bite, but the movie’s relentless severity also becomes tiring. By the end of three and a half hours, with a Part Two waiting in the wings, the exhaustion is very real.

You walk out of *Dhurandhar* feeling roughed up. I’m still unsure what it finally believes about violence beyond the fact that it can be staged with bruising conviction. The film is overlong, politically abrasive, and often ugly on purpose. But it never feels dead. At a moment when so much blockbuster filmmaking resembles polished project management, Dhar has made something messy, angry, and unmistakably alive.