Nishaanchi

Noted French filmmaker and screenwriter Jean Renoir once said, a director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again. A decade back, I related to this famous quote while watching movies of Mahesh Bhatt and Ram Gopal Varma when their graphs were coming down. This week, Renoir’s words echoed in my ears while watching Anurag Kashyap’s Nishaanchi. One of the most original voices of our times, Anurag seems to have cut down his cult of Gangs of Wasseypur (GOW) into fragments and then casually stitched them into a fresh screenplay around crime, revenge, and sibling rivalry. Laced with potent social commentary on patriarchy and the politician-criminal nexus in the Hindi heartland, the idea is not new; some of his expressions of the human condition have become stock. However, like GOW, Anurag subverts Bollywood tropes and titles to create a tantalising experience that works in spurts and disappoints in chunks. The best is the limerick made out of Andha Kanoon, Sarkar, and Baghban.

When Gangs Of Wasseypur realised and became a cult in subsequent years, it paved the way for similar films. Stories set in the heartland, about crime, and of peculiar names. It set a template that several filmmakers tried to use; some created impact, but most failed to get the flavor that director Anurag Kashyap brought to the Wasseypur series. But what happens when Kashyap uses the same template that he had set to now after 13years? His latest Nishaanchi seems to be heavily inspired by the Gangs series with generational angst, revenge, and a bit of romance thrown in. Starring Monica Panwar, Vineet Kumar, Vedika Pinto, Mohammad Zeeshan Ayub, Kumud Mishra and debutant Aaishvary Thackeray- Nishaanchi has authentic performance and brings back Kashyap’s unique depiction of a small town in North India, but is marred by the filmmaker’s overindulgence.

Anurag Kashyap attempts a return to form with Nishaanchi. The film — with a title that translates roughly to a ‘slingshot sniper’ — is not only a throwback to the director’s audacious, gritty, earthy style of filmmaking but is also an ode to the kind of films that Kashyap — a knee-high movie buff from small-town Gorakhpur — grew up watching. Kashyap marries the raw gangsterism of some of his most seminal films — Satya and Shool (which he wrote) to Black Friday and Gangs of Wasseypur (that he directed) — to the elements of Hindi cinema, both mainstream and parallel, that were rampant in the 1970s and ’80s. Many of them may have been stereotypes, but they also formed and subsequently defined the pop-cultural fabric of the cinema of that era.

A dozen years after Gangs of Wasseypur, Anurag Kashyap springs a surprise. A gangster film so engaging that despite juggling with different time zones requiring different looks and general chaos with daddies getting killed, there’s clarity in the characters, situations and stories. Along with co-writers Ranjan Chandel and Prasoon Mishra, Anurag threads them with professional efficiency into a neat narrative. Aided with some of the wackiest numbers and freshest, peppiest background scores heard in a long time. Musicians Manan Bhardwaj, Dhruv Ghanekar, Anurag Saikia, Aaishvary Thackeray, Nishikar Chhibber and Piyush Mishra may take a bow. Early morning Kanpur in 2006. A punctual “manager babu” buys his customary channa-poori at 7.30am. A guard outside a bank gets chatty with a customer who’s come in before opening hours. Soon, a botched-up bank robbery.

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 pair of identical twins with clashing personalities, a perplexed mother, an absent father, a lover who’s a dancer, and a snake-like villain. No, this isn’t the setup for a ’70s masala potboiler. It is Anurag Kashyap’s latest directorial, Nishaanchi. And why not? If anyone outside of Farah Khan can claim to be a true disciple of the Salim–Javed brand of Bollywood masala, it’s Kashyap. The difference is that Kashyap didn’t grow up in town-side Bombay. His films, including this one, carry the flavors of the heartland while staying rooted in Bollywood idioms. Despite kitsch not being his forte, Nishaanchi is his most formulaic film since Mukkabaaz. The question is whether his 2-hour 56-minute gamble pays off.