Assi
2026
🎯 Verdict
✍️ Full Review
Assi has dragon’s breath. For the entirety of it’s runtime it fumingly snarls. Ultimately, a director cracked. Guessing that director would be Anubhav Sinha of all people was never on my list. I guess he has had it up to his neck dealing with nuanced conversations and having civil discourse. Giving a Gabbar Is Back/Bhavesh Joshi treatment to a sensitive topic would be an easy way out of a complex problem. Sinha rounds up his usual band of collaborators in this investigative/legal crime thriller that is horrendously detailed to the point of leaving you winced where the process of justice lays asunder after filtered through several layers of muck. Assi is clinical, painstakingly itemized and analytical and there lies the rub. The trade-off between subtlety and shock value drawn from the bestial nature of savagery, the product of an aggressive form of masculine power trip that doesn’t take consequentiality into account let alone moral imperative is the issue with the film here. But, at the same time Mr. Sinha also puts a fair bit of thematic underpinnings catering to the casual toxicity that seeps from the closest ones in the family and from acquaintances and society as a whole. The close-up shots were pretty on the nose, the dialogues unabashed, undisguised and bracingly pointed conveying the distressing elements that gradually weigh as much on the characters as on us audiences. A jarring experience. Overall, in an era of post Pink and Delhi Crime, it’s natural to expect more corrugation when it comes to similar premises, more complexity, more sensitivity and the ever-changing challenges associated with such cases as per the ground reality. Unfortunately, all of these were just glossed over because much of the focus was zeroed in on the heinousness of the crime itself and character-specific adversities, for the perps it was just a hitch. All in all, we have incessantly been consuming this diet of how the path that leads to the travesty of justice goes. It’s just that even though the maker’s and cast’s hearts were in the right place, Assi leaves more to be desired or should I say- More to be dreaded and frowned upon!! Or the topically worrying question- Have we gone numb because of the incidence rate of such unsettling depravity and the propensity of how shamefully the rest of the community behave around these “incidents”? Except for Kani Kusruti and Satyajit Sharma’s performances, everyone else feels tepid. P.S.- While that Chhole-bhature metaphor was very ballsy and spot on reflects the repugnant mindset, What’s up with the raag aalaap in the background when there is an abhorrently disturbing scene transpiring right on the screen!!!! For a sensitive subject about savagery, Sinha chooses sensational with brief moments of sanity.