Set against the grim reality of sexual violence that shadows everyday life in India, Assi emerges as one of the most unsettling and morally urgent works of Anubhav Sinha.
In a cinematic landscape often drawn to spectacle and escapism, Sinha chooses confrontation. He compels viewers to inhabit the suffocating world of a survivor whose pursuit of justice becomes a second ordeal, as punishing as the crime itself. Many films have depicted rape, but few have captured with such precision the pain, isolation, and institutional indifference that follow. The film lingers long after the screen fades to black, not because of shock alone, but because it refuses consolation.
In this sense, the film echoes the searing insight of Susan Brownmiller in her classic Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape: "the real reason that women are afraid to walk alone at night is not the dark — it is men." Brownmiller's argument was that women's fear in public spaces is socially produced, not natural; darkness itself is not the threat, but the ever-present possibility of male violence.
Assi translates that insight into cinematic language, showing how terror does not end with the act of violence but seeps into institutions, memory, and everyday life, turning survival into a prolonged struggle against erasure and indifference.
This is not a big-budget, star-centred production; rather, its aesthetic force derives from a deliberate austerity that mirrors the subject it seeks to interrogate. The narrative maps the survivor's attritional passage through institutional sites such as police stations, hospitals, courtrooms as well as through socially charged spaces where suspicion precedes empathy and stigma structures interaction.
Procedural inertia manifests through endless adjournments, evidentiary compromise, bureaucratic delay, and the diffuse intimidation exercised by entrenched power. Such representation foregrounds the structural, rather than incidental, obstacles embedded within the justice process.
Anubhav Sinha thus reaffirms his commitment to a cinema of social accountability, demonstrating that the medium can operate as a critical public discourse rather than as mere spectacle. Having attended a special screening in Delhi in the presence of the director and principal actors, one is struck by the coherence of his oeuvre; a sustained engagement with narratives that unsettle moral complacency and compel audiences to confront the ethical contradictions of contemporary society.
What distinguishes Assi is its refusal to treat sexual violence as an aberration committed by monstrous individuals. Instead, it frames rape as a social text; written by patriarchy, enforced by institutions, and normalised by everyday complicity.
The police station that doubts, the courtroom that humiliates, the neighbourhood that whispers, and the political class that converts outrage into rhetoric together form the ecology that sustains violence. In doing so, the film shifts attention from the brutality of the act to the structures that enable it and, in many ways, makes people learn to live with it.
From a feminist perspective, the film exposes how control over women's bodies remains central to the architecture of social power. The violence depicted is not driven by desire but by entitlement; a punitive assertion meant to discipline autonomy over movement, speech, or sexuality.
Casual misogyny, victim-blaming, and anxieties about "family honour" operate as cultural scaffolding that renders brutality both thinkable and defensible. What is most unsettling is the ordinariness of these attitudes. The perpetrators may be few, but the mindset that sustains them is widely diffused.
The survivor's struggle is thus bifurcated. She must negotiate the psychic aftermath of sexual violence while simultaneously confronting a parallel juridical–social process that places her own character under scrutiny rather than the conduct of the accused. Her credibility becomes the primary site of adjudication: her attire, mobility, presence in public space, and the adequacy of her resistance are mobilised as evidentiary tests of truth.
The film thereby exposes what feminist jurisprudence conceptualises as secondary victimisation; a process through which legal and social institutions, ostensibly designed to secure justice, reproduce violence in symbolic and procedural forms. Within this framework, silence is normalised as protection, compromise reframed as prudence, and erasure misrecognised as recovery.
The pursuit of justice, consequently, is discursively constructed not as an entitlement grounded in rights, but as an act of transgression against entrenched social norms. Legally, Assi is an indictment of the distance between progressive law and regressive practice added by the masculine socialisation which goes on in families as well as schools.
Over the past decade, statutory reforms have expanded definitions of sexual offences and emphasised consent. Yet the film suggests that legal change without institutional transformation produces only procedural justice; a system that moves but seldom delivers closure.
Police investigations appear shaped by scepticism; medical examinations by outdated assumptions; trials by defence strategies that weaponize humiliation. Due process, intended to ensure fairness, becomes an ordeal that tests the survivor's endurance more than the accused's culpability.
The courtroom sequences are particularly devastating as they reveal how the adversarial system can collapse into moral theatre, where cross-examination becomes indistinguishable from character assassination. It is as if the law still searches for the "perfect victim"; modest, restrained, and socially approved. When acquittals follow hostile investigations and delayed trials, impunity ceases to be merely a legal outcome, it becomes a social message about whose suffering counts.
The film also interrogates the politics of outrage as public protests, media debates, and official condemnations appear as fleeting moments of collective conscience that quickly dissolve into routine. Episodic anger, the film suggests, cannot substitute for structural reform underlining that without transformation in policing, judicial sensitivity, witness protection, and social attitudes, each new case risks becoming a repetition of the last. Memory fades; trauma does not.
Perhaps the most disquieting insight Assi offers is that normalisation is the final stage of violence because when crimes become mere statistics and survivors become cautionary tales, society adapts rather than transforms. The burden of safety shifts onto women; restrict movement, modify behaviour, remain vigilant, while institutions evade accountability. In such a climate, justice is reduced to symbolism, and citizenship itself becomes conditional.
Yet I would say that the film is not entirely without hope. By forcing viewers to confront discomfort, it performs an ethical function that law alone cannot as it insists that sexual violence is not a "women's issue" but a democratic one, implicating the values by which a society measures itself. It asks whether constitutional promises of equality and dignity can survive in a culture that treats women's autonomy as negotiable.
Ultimately, Assi is less a film about a single case than a mirror held up to the nation. The reflection it offers is uncomfortable but necessary. It reminds us that the true measure of a democracy lies not in the eloquence of its laws or the intensity of its outrage, but in the everyday security and dignity of its citizens. Until the struggle against sexual violence moves beyond courtrooms and into classrooms, homes, workplaces, and political discourse, where norms are produced and reproduced; the distance between justice as an ideal and justice as lived experience will continue to be mapped onto the lives of women.
In that sense, Assi endures not merely as cinema but as a civic intervention and it boldly calls upon viewers to refuse indifference, to recognise complicity, and to imagine a society where survival does not require silence and justice does not demand heroism.
(Professor Manoj Kumar Jha is Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha), Rashtriya Janata Dal.)