In Kennedy, Anurag Kashyap returns to the exential interior, creating his most personal film since Ugly | Bollywood News

In Kennedy, the hitman barely matters. He could be anyone, or no one, and the film would not really change. As his own reckoning of exence hints at the trembling conscience of the country. As the film’s subtext is also very much its text. Because what Anurag Kashyap traces is larger. He’s tapping into the architecture of power: where politicians bend to capital, where the wealthy pull the strings, and the enforcers of law become instruments of their own rage. He’s also mourning a Mumbai that is both alive and dying, a zero-sum city where every gain is someone else’s loss. Corruption is survival; survival carries the contagion of prejudice. And the virus that snaps the back of the system is both literal and metaphorical. This is many films in one: a crime story, a political fable, a city elegy. But at its heart, it is a filmmaker, haunted his own past, casting shadows over his life, searching in the dark corners of cynicism for a glimmer of hope.
It is no wonder the film opens with a quote, borrowed, from William Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence: “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” It is a reflection, in some strange, inevitable way, of Kashyap’s own journey. In his youth, he began with gladness, with fire, with works that shook the air: Black Friday, Dev.D, Gangs of Wasseypur. Yet over time, those very works have become a source of despondency. The burden of their legacy outweighs the joy they once gave. He is repeatedly measured against them, asked to summon again the same frenzy, the same high. In much the same way, Kennedy (Rahul Bhatt), a man shaped his own past, finds himself a ghost on a manhunt, moving through a world where the living are no less monstrous than the shadows he pursues.
In some ways, Kennedy can be read as a companion piece to Ugly.
It is captured in the film’s most harrowing moment: Kennedy sets out to kill an upright veteran activ, and instead, in a single, ruthless sweep, annihilates the man’s entire family. He turns next to a group of men eating the roadside, and unleashes the same indiscriminate violence. What sears itself into memory is not only a man propelled blind vengeance, unsure where it begins or ends, but a contagion of bloodlust so potent that it leaps from him to the activ’s own son, who, swept up in the frenzy, joins Kennedy in the murder of his father. It’s here, Kashyap lays bare a world reduced to zeros and ones; a world driven futile rage, marked pointless violence. And through this moment, he confronts the aftermath of his own creation, his protagon, a man dictated entirely his fury, deserving of no mercy, not even from himself.
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In that sense, it recalls Sriram Raghavan’s Badlapur, where the hunter becomes the hunted. Kennedy, like him, moves blindly through his quest, hunting a man who is less a target than a mirror, as he is, in truth, very much chasing closure he cannot yet name. It is an intriguing study of character: even the supposed antagon recognizes the hero’s blind spots, calling out the violence he cannot see in himself. And yet, Kennedy, who thinks of himself as a mechanism for instant justice (at one point declares that a criminal should be shown no mercy), cannot extend the same justice to his own fractured soul. So just like the film, his rage can be read in many ways, among them, as an allegory for a society driven instinctive violence, a hint towards the mob teeming with fury yet oblivious to its own destructiveness.
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However, the film that Kennedy most closely resembles is, in fact, a companion piece is Kashyap’s own 2013 feature Ugly, which also placed Bhatt at its center. There, as here, he constructs a genre piece only to expose the fractured moralities of the world. There, as here, the story revolves around an absentee father and a lost daughter. There, as here, the central narrative is very much the macguffin. In Ugly, the search for the missing daughter reveals the absence of humanity. In Kennedy, the hunt for a man reveals the ruin within the hunter. Time ticks forward within the film, moving inexorably towards “The Night,” yet the time the moment arrives, you understand that there will be no dawn from hereon. Even as the film opens with a Wordsworth quote, it feels closer to Beckett: in its reckoning, in its surreal flourishes, in its endless relentless waiting. And yet, it circles always back to the personal: a father’s phone rings again and again, and a daughter waits at the other end, hoping, praying, that someone will answer.