Every 20 minutes in Anubhav Sinha’s Assi, the screen turns red and the words ‘20 minutes’ appear on the screen. The statistic that this film is built on tells us that every 20 minutes in India, a rape is reported. Eighty (or assi) per day. Sinha’s choice to remind us of this every 20 minutes—taking us out of the film and also bringing us back into its arguments—is only one of his many bold and unsettling choices in this film.
Ever since 2018’s Mulk, the Anubhav Sinha renaissance has shifted away from starry glamorous films to committed and focused dramas about social issues. The best of these remains Thappad (2020)—where Sinha tackled domestic violence in a beautiful melodrama set amidst the wealth and splendour of upper-class Delhi—but films like Article 15 (2019) and Bheed (2023) also sank their claws into us and made their points fiercely.
Sinha’s Unflinching Gaze at Violence
So too does Assi, in which Parima (Kani Kusruti, who is pitch-perfect), a schoolteacher, is kidnapped on her way home and gang-raped one horrible night in Delhi. As her husband Vinay (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) and son Dhruv (Advik Jaiswal) wait for her return, Parima is assaulted in her abductors’ car. Here is another of Sinha’s unsettling storytelling decisions (the film is written by Sinha and Gaurav Solanki): he takes us right into the car as the rapes are happening.
There is no shock value here: no background score, no dread-filled build-ups. No, we are just in the car, as the man driving weakly pleads with his friends to stop, as they take turns having their way with Parima, as one or another of them films the goings-on…
What I am grateful for is that a filmmaker like Sinha is willing to take risks like Assi. He’s willing to make mistakes in service of a greater achievement. I may not agree with his portrayal of rape, but I admire how he is unafraid to face the cruelty we inflict on each other.
Nothing works in black-and-white in his cinema: there are no ‘good guys’ who will save us from the ‘bad guys’. Assi is filled with deeply knotty individuals.
Blurring the Moral Lines
Consider Sanjay (the very dishy Jatin Goswami), one of the cops working on Parima’s case. He loves poetry and is known to quote Ramdhari Singh Dinkar and Vinod Kumar Shukla to the men he apprehends. (I wasn’t sure what this was meant to suggest: were the criminals worse because they’re uncultured boors? Would it have made their crimes any less heinous if they were readers of Dinkar?) He is upright and on the side of the law. But as the case seems to slip away, as evidence and proof become increasingly hard to come by, Sanjay becomes desperate and gives in to unsavoury means to achieve his ends.
His ally is the prosecution lawyer Raavi (Taapsee Pannu), who fights Parima’s case in court and fearlessly faces attacks, attempts at bribery, and online trolling. But even Raavi is not above using casual bribery herself to obtain some incriminating CCTV footage. Again, nobody is entirely black or entirely white.
Another key player—and the film’s most interesting, unusual character—is Kartik (Kumud Mishra in smart, sharp form). Kartik is Vinay’s boss at a local supermarket, but slowly we come to see that he has a very sketchy past and deep emotional wounds. His involvement in the case appears tangential at first, but gradually he becomes more and more important. It is a pity, then, that despite the screen time and close involvement in the central story, his own history remains somewhat enshrouded in doubt and mystery.
Justice, Revenge and the Cost of Moral Certainty
Again and again, Sinha and Solanki are at pains to represent differing points of view, even on the same side of the case. True radical change, they posit, can come only through fraught discussion, not through easy agreement.
When the accused begin to be killed off in a series of frightening extrajudicial killings, Raavi is quick to condemn this behaviour openly. If murder can be justified as revenge for rape, she argues, what is to stop rape from being justified as revenge for rape? And then more murder to avenge that rape?
Meanwhile, what does Parima feel? She confesses quietly to Vinay that hearing one of her rapists had been killed made her feel good—but that she doesn’t want to feel this way.
These push-pull opinions make Assi a fascinating film to grapple with. It goes beyond simple (perhaps even simplistic) narratives like ‘rape is wrong’. It raises questions on what justice looks like, on the nature of a crime and its aftermath, and particularly on how adults and children respond to these issues.
Dhruv is often at the forefront of these scenes. Many people urge Vinay to shield him, to leave him at home, but Vinay wants him to see and hear and witness. Tellingly, Mulligan often lowers his camera to Dhruv’s eyeline and we take in scenes from this perspective. At the end, the presiding judge (Revathy) addresses the children in the courtroom: ‘Kids, do well. Do better than us.’ Assi asks this of us all.
Assi releases in theatres on 20 February.
(Sahir Avik D'souza is a writer based in Mumbai. His work has been published by Film Companion, TimeOut, The Indian Express and EPW. He is an editorial assistant at Marg magazine.)