Warning: mild spoilers ahead for Nishaanchi
What do we want from an Anurag Kashyap film in 2025? The shadow of the term “comeback film” looms large over Nishaanchi, the filmmaker’s first theatrical release since 2022’s bewildering Almost Pyaar With DJ Mohabbat.
You step into the pulpy, promising world of Nishaanchi with one main question: Is Kashyap back? It’s a question that’s actually two: is this a good film—and is this the kind of film we want from Anurag Kashyap?
A director who seems trapped by the weight of his own legacy, legend and rich, two-decade-plus filmography, Kashyap needs a win. A film that reminds his feverish fanbase what made him arguably the most defining Hindi filmmaker of the 2000s.
But he seems to be lost between the stories he wants to tell, the ones he’s allowed to tell in the current climate, and the ones his fans want from him – “one more Gangs Of Wasseypur”.
The legacy of his epic, rip-roaring 2012 gangster saga—and one of my favourite films—hangs heavy over Nishaanchi. You can tell he knows it’s what people want. On the surface of this film, he toys with conceding, giving us another “sprawling” intergenerational saga (Nishaanchi is part one of two films) and gangland world set in Kanpur in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Aaishvary Thackeray in a still from Nishaanchi
Anurag Kashyap Is Trapped By The Weight Of His Own Legacy
But I refuse to believe this is Kashyap giving the people what they want. Because Nishaanchi—unexciting, overlong, and indulgent—isn’t even remotely as enjoyable, alive, or crackling as Wasseypur.
The punishing three-hour narrative sent me spiralling through multiple existential crises. Do you know what it’s like to feel so little for anything or anyone on screen for that long? At some point, you start questioning everything you know and wonder if you’re the problem.
Nishaanchi isn’t Wasseypur—which is fine. So then what is it? A response to Wasseypur? A kind of subversive metaphor? A giant middle finger to an audience who merely wants more Wasseypur? Am I missing something?
There is no lack of conviction and confidence in the storytelling here. The hallmarks of the Kashyap style are all there—the colourful album, the texture, the examining of love through lust. But Kashyap and his co-writers Ranjan Chandel and Prasoon Mishra weave an unexciting tapestry of banal conflicts (jealousy, betrayal, revenge, love triangles,- it’s all there), lost in a gruelling, overstretched narrative.
Nishaanchi suffers from a tiring indulgence. Not just in its tedious pacing and on a larger structural level—taking its own sweet time to click into place and have us understand how the plot and character pieces fit together—but even right down to scenes and sequences that seem to go on and on.
Kashyap and editor Aarti Bajaj seem determined to give a giant middle finger to the attention spans of the Instagram generation (I think?), which is admirable on some level. But not if the result is this restless.
If anything, Nishaanchi feels more like an ambitious series masquerading as an overstuffed, overlong film. Perhaps I’ve been too conditioned by the streaming era, but I started re-editing the narrative in my head, looking for natural “cut points” for episode endings.
Kumud Mishra in a still from Nishaanchi
A Series Masquerading As A Film
Episode 1: We’re flung into the world of twin brothers Dabloo and Babloo (both played by an enjoyable, self-assured Aaishvary Thackeray). Together with Babloo’s girlfriend Rinku (Vedika Pinto has striking presence), they loot banks.
When a robbery goes wrong, Babloo is put behind bars by a slimy cop (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub), leaving Dabloo and Rinku at the hands of local crime boss Ambika Prasad (Kumud Mishra). Pilot episode ends.
Episode 2: We learn more about the twins, and about Ambika’s nefarious plan: he wants to demolish Rinku’s home to build a shopping mall. It is revealed that Babloo was once Ambika’s right-hand man.
All this whilst the makers continue to insist that (the always excellent) Monika Panwar plays Dabloo and Babloo’s mother despite making no real attempt to visibly age her (?).
Episodes 3 and 4 give us a massive, extended flashback sequence to tell us about what became of the twins’ father Jabardast Pehalwan (a shining Vineet Kumar Singh, who’s having quite the year). Girish Sharma is also particularly good here as young Ambika.
Chapters 5 and 6 bring us back to the present day to catch us up to how the twins got to where they were at the start of the film.
The result is what feels like one giant setup movie, which gives us little by way of a “pay-off”, no doubt leaving that for the second part. Nishaanchi leaves us hanging, not off a cliff as much as a slightly elevated surface.
None of the ‘lingering conflicts’ are even remotely interesting enough to deserve or inspire a second film. Forget any sense of scale or epic-ness to this saga, I was left with no anticipation or even mild curiosity about where this story, or this world, is headed.
Vedika Pinto in a still from Nishaanchi
‘Nishaanchi’ Has A Stakes Problem
It’s partly because Nishaanchi has a stakes problem, primarily through its antagonist Ambika Prasad. I still couldn’t explain to you what he wants from any of these characters over the two decades that pass in the film.
Whether it’s his odd equation with Jabardast. Or that at the start of the film, he appears to have power over Monika Panwar’s character, but a scene towards the end seems to suggest the opposite. Ambika has a soft corner for Babloo, I think, but when things sour between them, he doesn’t seem to be any real threat to him.
What we’re left with is a movie of stray solid moments (some glorious dialoguebaazi) and sequences.
How sad that the narrative is so lifeless, considering its two action set pieces are so alive and among the finest Hindi cinema has given us this year.
From a visceral Dabloo prison fight with the camera clinging to his back, to a strikingly shot one-take bar shootout with DOP Sylvester Fonseca’s camera whizzing through the air with a mind of its own.
A muted crime saga that constantly simmers but never quite takes off.
Nishaanchi leaves us with the threat of a sequel through a baffling post-credit scene, which features a key character sporting a KGF-style beard that looks nothing short of spoofy. The deafening message is clear: Season 2 coming soon.
Nishaanchi is out in theatres on September 19.
(Suchin Mehrotra is a critic and film journalist who covers Indian cinema for a range of publications. He’s also the host of The Streaming Show podcast on his own YouTube channel. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
‘The Umesh Chronicles’: Amitabh Bachchan Elevates a Tender but Uneven Film
Source
