I did not walk into Dhurandhar curious about box office numbers, controversies, bans, or counter-opinions. All of that arrives later anyway, whether you invite it or not. I walked in with something quieter. A question I did not know how to phrase yet.
Some films announce themselves loudly. They demand allegiance, applause, and agreement. But Dhurandhar does not ask. It confronts. And confrontation is a different kind of intimacy.
The film is three and a half hours long. You feel it. Not as fatigue, but as weight. Dhurandhar does not rush you through its world. It insists you sit with it. With its chapters. With its pauses. With its certainties. It is structured deliberately, broken into segments that feel almost literary, each chapter tightening the emotional screws just a little more. When the final chapter arrives, titled Et Tu, Brute?, it feels earned rather than clever. A question mark hanging over loyalty, betrayal, and history itself. Also, a subtle nod to Shakespeare (IYKYK)!
Today, days later, I remember the theatre more than the trailer. The stillness before the screen lit up. The faint shuffling that stops when people realise this is not going to be an easy watch, right from the first scene. A collective bracing. That moment always tells you more than the opening credits.
There is something unsettling about films that refuse to be just entertainment. They don’t let you lean back fully. They don’t allow detachment. You are pulled into proximity with things you would otherwise prefer to keep at arm’s length. History. Violence. Loyalty. Fear. And the uncomfortable ways these things overlap.
Dhurandhar lives there.
What struck me early on was the tone of this espionage thriller. Not the scale. Not the action. The tone. There is a heaviness that does not come from background score or dialogue alone. It comes from intention. The film knows exactly what it wants to evoke, and it does not soften the edges to make itself more palatable.
This is not a film interested in neutrality.
And that, in itself, is worth sitting with.
Ranveer Singh’s performance has been spoken about enough, so I will not rehearse adjectives. What stayed with me was not the intensity but the control. The restraint underneath the ferocity. The sense that the character is always a step away from unravelling, yet never fully allowed to. That tension is exhausting to watch. It is meant to be.
But the film is not held together by one performance alone. It is held together by a shared understanding of silence. The pauses. The looks that linger too long. The moments where nothing is explained because explanation would dilute impact. And the chemistry between, surprisingly, all the main faces.
Akshaye Khanna, currently and rightfully termed the legend, brings something rarer. He does not demand attention. He commands it quietly. There is a sharpness in his performance, a precision that feels almost surgical. Every word feels weighed. Rahman Dakait feels like someone who has seen empires rearrange themselves around him and learned to remain indispensable to all of them. Khanna plays him not as a criminal, but as a historian of violence.
Arjun Rampal carries his character, Major Iqbal, with a bruised masculinity that feels lived-in. There is fatigue in his eyes, scars on his face, and history in his shoulders. He represents the kind of man who has been tested too many times to become what he is.
R. Madhavan represents the bureaucratic spine of intelligence history. The planners. The analysts. The men who never pull triggers but know exactly where the bullets will land. Historically, these figures shaped outcomes from rooms far removed from the field, operating on information, probability, and long-term consequence. His character is someone burdened by foresight. He knows too much to be idealistic and too much to be cynical. That tension never leaves his face.
And then there is Sanjay Dutt. Our very own Sanju Baba. There is something mythic about seeing him in a role like this. His physicality, his voice, and the weight he brings from his own cinematic history bleed into the character he plays. You are not just watching a man. You are watching a legacy walk into the frame.
Additionally, special shoutouts to Danish Pandor, Rouhallah Gazi, Sara Arjun, Gaurav Gera, Rakesh Bedi, Naveen Kaushik, and Saumya Tandon; people without whom the movie would’ve been incomplete.
Together, these characters do not just inhabit a story. They carry (real) histories of power exercised quietly, brutally, and often invisibly. Knowing where they come from makes it easier to understand why they behave the way they do.
And harder to judge them cleanly.
What surprised me most was the music.
Not just because it works, but because of how it works.
The film brings back iconic songs and reframes them without stripping them of their soul. That is not easy. Nostalgia is a dangerous tool. Used lazily, it collapses into a gimmick. Here, it becomes emotional shorthand. The familiarity anchors you, while the context unsettles you. Songs you thought you knew feel heavier, darker, more intimate.
“Nazar aur sabr” becomes more than a dialogue. It becomes a thesis. Watchful patience. Seeing without flinching. Waiting without weakening. The music does not interrupt the narrative. It deepens it. Lyrics surface quietly, almost like thoughts rather than performances, and you end up interpreting the meaning behind them as you watch the action unfold on screen before you.
And when you are too deep into the movie, suddenly, it is almost time for interval, and you’re jolted back to reality with the red screen and get reminded about the characters being portrayed in the movie.
There is a particular sequence that many people have spoken about, connected to a real collective wound. I will not describe it here. Not because it is taboo, but because description feels unnecessary. If you have lived with that history, your body recognises it before your mind does. The reaction is physical. A tightening. A discomfort that has nothing to do with cinematic technique. And you don’t even realise it till you suddenly unclench your teeth, open your fists and take a deep, trembling breath.
This is where the film becomes divisive, and understandably so.
Some viewers feel seen. Others feel provoked. Some feel retraumatised. And some respond with defensiveness. None of these reactions are wrong. They are responses to memory, not fiction. The film becomes a mirror, and mirrors rarely flatter everyone at once.
What interested me more was how quickly conversations around Dhurandhar stopped being about the film and started being about allegiance.
To like it meant something. To critique it meant something else.
Nuance became suspicious. Silence became complicity. Appreciation became endorsement.
That is a dangerous space for art to occupy, but also an honest one.
Cinema, at its most powerful, has always been political even when it pretends not to be. What Dhurandhar does differently is refuse the pretence. It does not attempt balance as a moral exercise. It chooses a side and commits to it fully.
You may agree with that choice. You may not. But you cannot accuse the film of being unaware of what it is doing.
There is also a curious undercurrent of discomfort visible online, especially in how people talk around the film rather than about it. Jokes. Memes. Deflections. Or maybe even the now viral and legendary dance sequence in reels. Humour is often how we metabolise things we are not ready to confront directly. Turning intensity into digestible fragments. Reducing threat through repetition and laughter.
That too is part of the film’s afterlife.
For me, the most unsettling aspect was not the violence or the nationalism. It was the emotional certainty the film operates within. There is little room for ambiguity inside the narrative itself. The ambiguity exists only in the audience’s response. That inversion is intentional.
We are used to films that leave interpretation open. Dhurandhar leaves the reaction open instead.
As I walked out almost four hours later, I noticed people speaking in lowered voices. Some animated. Some quiet. Some angry. Some thoughtful. Very few indifferent. Indifference is usually the real verdict, and this film does not earn that.
Days later, what remains with me are not scenes but sensations. The weight of history pressing against personal identity. The discomfort of recognising how easily stories become symbols. How quickly art becomes a stand-in for belief. How fragile nuance becomes in moments of collective emotion.
I will watch Dhurandhar again. Not to catch details I missed, but to see what shifts the second time.
All I know is that this is a film that will be revisited by conversation, debate, and memory. It will be cited. It will be defended. It will be rejected. It will be reframed.
And perhaps that was always the point.
Some films entertain. Some films impress. A few films unsettle the ground beneath the viewer and then leave them there, without instructions on how to feel next.
Dhurandhar does that.
What you do with that discomfort says more about you than it does about the film.
And maybe that is where its real power lies.
The post-credit trailer for Part 2, Revenge, arriving in March 2026, does not feel like a promise. It feels like a warning. This story is not done with us yet. And perhaps, more importantly, it is not done asking questions it knows will not have easy answers.
I’ll leave you here, because the title track of the film already understands what the movie is circling around, far better than any explanation can.
“I’m a king, but I’m far from a saint.
They call me a bad man, that’s a f*cking good thing.
Mama said, swing back when another man swings.
So I make my mama proud and make the hits rain.
Father, forgive me, I can’t forgive them.
You know my history, you know what I did then.
What I do now, a whole lot worse.
Heavy is the head, it’s a blessing and a curse…”
That is Dhurandhar in essence. Power without absolution. History without innocence. A man shaped by what came before him, and condemned by what he chooses next. The crown weighs heavy not because it shines, but because it remembers.
And that weight, once felt, does not leave you easily.
