Andhadhun
Synopsis:
Ayushmann Khurrana is holding a heavy metal crutch and swinging it wildly inside a sketchy moving van while blood is everywhere and he's totally panicking because he thinks he's about to lose his actual corneas to some shady organ harvesters. And then boom, let's just back up for a second because Andhadhun starts way before all that chaotic van stuff with a blind guy just trying to play the piano in a cozy little Pune cafe.
His name is Akash and he's this total scam artist pretending to have zero vision just so he can get better art inspiration for his music, which honestly feels like a terrible life choice from the jump. He bumps into Sophie, played by Radhika Apte, and she's just driving her scooter all reckless and nearly hits him, which somehow turns into an instant romance because she loves his piano skills and gets him a steady gig at her dad's restaurant, Lord Sinha.
God, and that is where things get completely unhinged because Pramod Sinha, who used to be this huge 1970s Bollywood superstar, hires Akash to come play a private anniversary concert at his fancy apartment for his much younger wife Simi, and get this, Tabu is playing Simi and she's terrifyingly good at being pure evil. Akash shows up and rings the bell and nobody answers for a minute because Simi is literally standing right over her murdered husband's dead body on the living room floor, trying to figure out how to stuff him into a large black suitcase without getting her white designer dress dirty.
Stuff happens and Akash pretends he doesn't see a single thing and just sits at the grand piano and plays these haunting tunes while a dead body is chilling a few feet away, and honestly the tension here is so thick you could cut it with a butter knife, and oh, can we just talk about the random background extra in the hallway wearing this atrocious mustard yellow turtleneck that clashes horribly with the apartment wallpaper? It's all I could look at during the murder cover-up.
Simi and her secret police officer lover Manohar are cleaning up the mess while Akash pretends to be blind and keeps sweeping his cane around, and he accidentally knocks over a chess piece or a glass or something, and then he spots the corpse's foot sticking out behind the sofa, but he keeps his cool because he wants to survive the afternoon, but then he goes to the bathroom and sees Pramod's blood everywhere and washes his hands while dying inside.
And then the movie hits the interval block right when Inspector Manohar walks in and realizes Akash was there the whole time, and man, typical bollywood movies always put the intermission right at the absolute worst cliffhanger possible, leaving us all hanging at the popcorn counter.
Sophie gets super suspicious when Akash suddenly ghosts her and disappears from the restaurant after the murder, and she tries to track him down, while back at the apartment, Simi realizes Akash isn't actually blind because she sprays eye-drop poison right into his face and he flinches, which is just a wild way to diagnose someone's visual impairment.
Akash tries to run away and goes to the local police station to file an FIR about the murder he witnessed, but guess who is sitting behind the desk running the whole operation—Inspector Manohar himself, who casually closes the station door and threatens to destroy Akash's entire life.
Bollywood movies love a good musical number to break up the misery, so right after this soul-crushing realization that the police are corrupt murderers, they randomly shove in a song where Akash is walking down the street singing about his miserable fake-blind life, and it's totally tone-deaf to the dark comedy happening around him.
Everything spirals completely out of control because Swami the shady neighborhood doctor and his sketchy clinic assistants get involved, and they decide to kidnap Simi for ransom, but then things double-cross themselves because Swami wants to harvest Simi's eyes to sell them on the black market to pay off his gambling debts, and honestly, the plot twists are coming so fast you can't even blink.
And then boom, Swami drugs Akash and throws him into the back of that exact same moving van I mentioned at the very beginning of this whole mess, right alongside a panicked Simi who is tied up and gagged.
Swami tries to remove Simi's eyes in the middle of a deserted forest clearing using sketchy surgical tools, but Simi wakes up and fights back with pure demonic rage, killing Swami right there in the dirt before turning her sights entirely on Akash, who is still stumbling around swinging his metal crutch like a maniac.
Simi tricks Akash into thinking she's letting him go, but she drives her car straight toward him to finish the job once and for all, only for Inspector Manohar to show up out of nowhere and try to stop her, leading to a brutal struggle where Simi ends up killing Manohar too because she's basically an unstoppable horror movie villain in a stylish saree.
Years later, Akash is hanging out in some colorful foreign cafe in Europe, telling this tall tale to a random doctor about how he went totally blind after Simi poisoned him, and how he somehow escaped her wrath, and how he eventually made his way out of India.
The doctor listens to this crazy story and tells Akash that Simi has a rare medical condition and her blood could actually cure his blindness, and that Akash should let him take him to a clinic to harvest her eyes instead, which is super messed up.
Akash gets into the back of the doctor's car with a cane in his hand, and he looks totally helpless and blind to the driver in the front seat.
The car drives away down the dusty dirt road, and Akash casually swings his metal cane forward, knocking a tin can completely out of his path with pinpoint accuracy before the screen instantly cuts to black.
Tabu eats a hardboiled egg in the kitchen with a vicious, distracted efficiency that tells you more about her state of mind than five minutes of internal monologue ever could. It is a small thing, but it bugged me that nobody talks about the eggs in this movie because they keep showing up during moments of absolute crisis, cracking and peeling while people plot murders over tea. Sriram Raghavan doesn't care about making his villains look cool or cinematic when they are off duty, which is why Andhadhun works on you like a slow-acting poison instead of a brisk amusement park ride that you forget by the time you reach the parking lot. You sit there in the dark watching an ostensibly blind piano player stumble into a living room with a corpse strapped to a chair, and for a long stretch, you just forget how tired you are of Bollywood movies that take themselves too seriously.
Ayushmann Khurrana plays Akash with a kind of twitchy, damp-palmed desperation that feels entirely divorced from the usual movie star vanity. He isn't noble. He isn't particularly clever once the wheels come off his little scam. He is just a guy who wanted to practice his Chopin in peace and accidentally wandered into a bloody farce involving a washed-up actor and his homicidal wife. The screenplay by Raghavan, Arijit Biswas, Yogesh Chandekar, Hemanth Rao, and Pooja Ladha Surti does something very difficult with its tone, shifting from domestic slapstick to genuine cruelty without making you feel like you got whiplash from a bad gear change. If I'm honest, the second half gets a little messy with the organ harvesting subplot, stretching credibility past the breaking point into cartoon territory, but the momentum is so relentless that you just roll with it because stopping to think too hard about the logistics will make the whole house of cards fall down.
Then there is Tabu as Simi, playing a woman who smiles with her mouth while her eyes calculate the distance to the nearest blunt object. She brings the same cold gravity to this role that she brought to Haider, except here the tragedy has been stripped away and replaced with a sharp, petty malice that is much more fun to watch. She doesn't chew the scenery. She swallows it whole and asks for seconds while wiping blood off her blouse. Radhika Apte pops up as the neighborhood girl who falls for Akash's fake blindness, and she has this great, skeptical way of looking at him as if she knows he is full of shit but hasn't quite decided whether to call him out on it yet. The supporting cast feels populated by actual human beings who live in Pune apartments that smell of stale oil and damp concrete rather than soundstages built by people who have never seen a middle-class Indian kitchen.
The cinematography by K.U. Mohanan avoids the slick, neon-drenched look that has infected half of all modern thrillers, opting instead for a grainy, washed-out daylight that makes everything feel uncomfortably exposed. When the camera tracks Akash's white cane tapping against the pavement, you notice how the sound design isolates him from the chaos of the street, until the editing cuts to a wide shot and reminds you how vulnerable he actually is in the middle of all that traffic. Amit Trivedi and Raajeev V. Bhalla provide a piano-heavy score that occasionally leans a bit too hard into suspense-movie clichés from the seventies, but the title track hits just right with its moody, jazzy swagger that stays in your head long after the house lights come up.
Hindi cinema has spent decades trying to figure out how to do black comedy without turning into a desperate cartoon or a moral lecture, and most attempts usually trip over their own feet by the interval. Raghavan avoids that trap by keeping his camera stubbornly fixed on the mundane details of hiding a body in a suitcase or fumbling with a pair of sunglasses while someone bleeds out on the rug. The moral compass here is completely dead, buried somewhere under the floorboards alongside a couple of unfortunate victims who thought they could outsmart a pianist with a fake visual impairment. It reminds you of old thrillers where nobody is safe and the protagonist is just as likely to lose a finger as he is to solve the crime.
There is an extended sequence in an abandoned clinic involving a shady doctor and a blindfolded hostage that goes on about two minutes longer than it should, dragging the narrative pace down right when it needs to be sprinting. It is a minor structural wobble, the kind of thing an impatient editor might have trimmed down on a Tuesday morning, but it lets the air out of the tires just a fraction. Even so, the sheer audacity of the final ten minutes more than makes up for that little dip in energy. You leave the theater arguing about what actually happened in those woods, and whether any of the stories Akash tells are even remotely true, which is usually the sign of a job well done.