The thick iron chain inches across Jaskirat’s face, its shearing force tearing into his brow and eye sockets. You almost flinch. Dhurandhar is a fast-paced film that knows exactly when to slow down—lingering, almost indulgently, on brutality, as if daring the audience to look away and then rewarding them for not doing so.
Violence, of course, is neither new to Hindi cinema nor beyond criticism. In an action-revenge saga, it is practically a narrative requirement. The real question is one of proportion: how much is too much? As a working rule, the more heinous the antagonist’s crime, the higher the audience’s tolerance for violence in retribution. Dhurandhar understands this instinct well. The film becomes more than spectacle and edges into something politically charged. Some critics read it as a propaganda vehicle, but that may be too reductive. The outrage it channels—and amplifies—feels recognisably public. The film revels in inventive brutality—skulls smashed in increasingly imaginative ways, a palm nailed to a table, even a grotesque game of street football with a severed head.
Director Aditya Dhar leans into stylisation. His fight sequences unfold like staged street theatre: exaggerated, rhythmic, almost participative. Even when the film stretches plausibility—a politician shot dead live on television (ironically, the shootout happened in real life and was recreated in Dhurandhar)—it carries it off with such conviction that disbelief becomes part of the viewing experience rather than a disruption. You don’t question it; you absorb it.
But this raises a larger question: are we entering an age of excess in Hindi cinema?
Excess is not inherently problematic; it becomes so only when it loses narrative proportion. That is where Animal stumbled. Its violence felt disproportionate to its emotional stakes, its provocations forced, compounded by a strain of misogyny and toxic masculinity that alienated as much as it shocked. Dhar’s films, in contrast, operate within a clearer moral universe.
This trajectory has been building for years. Quentin Tarantino’s cinema, especially Pulp Fiction, made violence quirky, ironic, even conversational. Hindi cinema found its own echo of this in films like Kaminey, where a moment of playful posturing turns, without warning, into cold-blooded murder. That tonal whiplash—the sudden shift from humour to horror—is now part of the grammar of contemporary action.
What these films share is a cartoony pastiche—heightened characters, stylised dialogue, violence that is both shocking and self-aware. And crucially, they have not been marginalised for it. Tarantino’s work—Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill: Volume 1—has been celebrated, awarded, canonised.
With Dhurandhar and its sequel, Hindi cinema seems to be inching toward a similar mainstream acceptance of stylised excess—where violence is not merely tolerated but aesthetically appreciated, even anticipated.
Whether this signals a lasting paradigm shift or just a phase remains to be seen. But for now, the question hangs in the air, blood-splattered and provocative: is Aditya Dhar becoming India’s Tarantino—or are we simply becoming more comfortable watching ourselves bleed on screen?