Happy, healthy film industries tend to reward loyal cinemagoers with a treat at the end of the year, a Muppet Christmas Carol or Paddington, say, maybe even a Wicked or an Avatar, if that's your bag. For Christmas 2025, the Indian cinema has deposited Aditya Dhar's Dhurandhar, handing audiences a film that falls somewhere between hot potato and Molotov cocktail while leaving critics facing a potential hospital pass. The first in a planned diptych, the new film extends the ideological project of its writer-director's sizeable 2019 hit Uri: The Surgical Strike in viewing India as under near-permanent attack from without, and in insisting, with fervour and at some length, that the barbarians are massing at the country's northwestern gates. After the keening summer of love proposed by this industry's runaway July hit Saiyaara, Dhar now plunges us into a potentially nuclear winter of discontent. As with 2023's Animal, a comparably incendiary Hindi hit that seemed to hail from a similar corner of social media (or had merely attended the same political rallies), my initial aim was to keep Dhurandhar at arm's length; in its homeland, those colleagues who haven't bowed down before the film's supposed might have received death threats (for the boys), rape threats (for the women) and a lighter, funnier strain of nitpicking that amounts to something like "you critics, always setting films in context, rather than enjoying them for what they are", which sounds somewhat like asking us to applaud Triumph of the Will for its crowd scenes and sound recording. Never mind the politics, feel the bloodlust. Still, the film has proven unignorably popular: it's currently third on the Indian box-office of 2025 list - behind the trippy Kannada vision Kantara: Chapter 1 and the bellowy Hindi historical Chhaava - and climbing the UK charts, presumably down to word-of-mouth. This stuff now sells bigtime - or, more accurately, the mechanisms have been set in place for it to be launched at a wider audience.
What, then, is being sold here exactly? Dhurandhar is the paranoid North imitating those rowdy, multi-part South Indian actioners that have been so in vogue since the turn of the decade; narratively, it's a spy thriller mirroring this century's altogether fraught diplomatic relations between two neighbouring, historically well-matched adversaries. In a 1999-set coda, a hijack of an Indian plane by Pakistani terrorists is ended semi-peaceably, but only after the latter faction have smirked "you Hindus are cowards"; a suicide-bomber attack on the Indian Parliament two years later proves more effective, however, leaving one security guard with her face blown wide open. A plan is thereafter hatched by India's top brass to smuggle their top spy into Pakistan to infiltrate - and then sabotage - such terror plots. The spy is played by Ranveer Singh, under flowing hair and beard; introduced being shuttled across the border to a thumping club track, he's barely sunk his first smoothie at the juicebar that provides his cover story before he's sexually assaulted by a local streetgang and threatened with rape. (At least we know where the more rabid fanboys are sourcing their ideas.) One of the few modern Indian stars who's also a bonafide actor, capable of subsuming his own personality within the contours of distinct characters, Singh should by rights be the film's biggest asset, and certainly his watchful stillness is useful early on: at the very least, it provides a stark contrast to all the heedless tumult occasioned as he descends into Karachi's underworld. Much like those star turns in the likes of Pushpa and KGF, though, this is ultimately more pose than role. In Dhurandhar's closing moments, by which point we realise we've learned next to nothing about our protagonist, we discover Singh will be assuming a whole new identity for March's second instalment, shaven-headed and beardless. The character has no identifiable centre, and as a result the movie has no centre. Our hero is initially a tourist, being shifted around a den of iniquity that's apparently been fostering terrorism, gang law, political corruption, fake gun factories and non-Hindus. (Thank heavens none of this is going on inside India, eh readers?) Only belatedly is he repositioned as the strongman India needs... and now he's going to be someone else, just because.
I should say at this point that Dhar is no fool: from a technical perspective, he's a far more proficient filmmaker than almost all of those contemporaries who've carried the flag into this particular theatre of war. (Set it next to the lumpen and retrograde Chhaava, and Dhurandhar may well appear a modern classic.) If our protagonist drifts in and out of focus, the story Dhar's telling here is detailed and not wholly uninvolving, and he knows the value of a propulsive setpiece to keep an audience onside: if he'd never subscribed to the Joe Rogan podcast (or local equivalent), he'd probably enjoy a celebrated career as a maker of enjoyably punchy and pulpy B-movies. He's also, though, canny indeed about the buttons he's pushing here. If you truly believe that Pakistan is a latter-day hell on earth, and that those living on the other side of the border deserve everything coming to them, then Dhurandhar will dutifully confirm every last one of your pre-existing biases. The rest of us, however, are left floating around in this editorially imposed quagmire for no less than 214 (count 'em) minutes, trying to figure out what our business is being here: are we meant to be tickled or terrified when an especially dead-eyed Sanjay Dutt shows up in hero whites to shoot a succession of young men through the face at close range? This isn't the only place where Dhurandhar begins to betray certain wearying characteristics of Right-leaning art. Taking three-and-a-half hours to tell half of its story, it makes the Wicked movies seem fleet of foot; Dhar's aiming for baroque - the story behind the headlines, a bigger-budget version of those darkly conspiratorial YouTube clips your uncle posts to the family What'sApp group - but this first instalment instead lands on long-winded and musty, full of grim-faced men muttering in darkened rooms, few of whom can match Singh's charisma and presence. Even when Dhar stops the movie dead in the second half to flash up typed transcripts of conversations between terrorists and hostages during the 26/11 attack on Mumbai - as if we'd all been gathered for a security briefing or a PowerPoint presentation - it's still talk: this is a movie that loves the sound of its own voice, and can't bring itself to mix up its messaging.
Dhar surely knows this, which is why he takes such pains to interrupt the lecture with material that feels more intrinsically cinematic. Those setpieces are worth talking about, and it's to the film's betterment that our knight-like hero takes possession of a shining steed - a Royal Enfield 350 motorbike - at the midpoint, even if he mainly uses it to transport his boss's princessy, phone-clutching teenage daughter. (As played by Sara Arjun, she's the closest the film has to a fully rounded female character, and she's basically the Pakistani equivalent of Bae from Call Me Bae.) Unlike Trump's residual fondness for the Village People - clung to as a dementia patient does a favourite song that reminds them of their youth - Dhar prefers cutting-edge dance beats; he succeeds in giving his nationalism a whole new, youth-friendly soundtrack, distinct from the usual battle cries and the drums of war. (Those attending one terrorist training camp can even be seen dancing; it's like the rave sequence in Sirāt.) And when all else fails to raise the pulse, there is always - and I do mean always - bloody, bludgeoning violence: skulls being bashed in with a market trader's weights, or removed from the neck area altogether; unfortunates being dragged through the streets at high speed and propelled into iron spikes; some Gibsonian torture (replete with especially grisly Foley work) as a gentle opener to the post-intermission carnage. This, too, is a way to liven matters up - at least one young man at my public screening could be heard whooping at such kills - but it's also just another button to be pushed, and Dhar hammers it so often over these 200-plus minutes that any effect soon wears off.
The weirdest form of trolling the critical naysayers have been facing is that stock RW riposte "triggered much?", and it's weird because the trolls are the ones being triggered by Dhurandhar: they've been roused by the violence to rally to the film's defence. The dissenters, it seems to me, have merely spotted the trigger mechanisms Dhar springloads beneath his drama like IEDs, and been numbed into understandable dispassion by their overuse; if we react to these gruesome deaths, it's not to cover our eyes or clutch at our pearls, rather to sigh and think what a brutal end that is for a character we haven't been given the slightest reason to care about over these three-and-a-half hours. But then Dhar's not trading in empathy, and he's not telling a story in the conventional sense; instead, he's been appointed to reinforce, through sounds and images, the pre-existing stories that have been planted in some people's heads by bad agents. This director is no fool, but he needs his target audience to be for Dhurandhar to take effect as it has: he needs them to exist in the state of unthinking, thoroughly uncritical ignorance that allows xenophobic hatred to take root and flourish. (You either swallow this stuff absolutely, or not at all.) There's no arguing with the fact Dhurandhar is more effective in what it's doing than 99% of the Hindi flagwavers that have come down the pipe of late - but what a funny-warped idea of entertainment this is, trebly so at this time of year. At the risk of getting all Judeo-Christian on Dhurandhar's ass, which strikes me as just about the last thing Dhar or his supporters would want: so much for peace on Earth and goodwill to all men.
Dhurandhar is now playing in selected cinemas.
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