Phir Aayi Hasseen Dilruba

Director Jayprad Desai’s Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba begins like a pulpy, C-grade Hindi novel: with high drama. On a dark, rainy night in Agra, a woman is running for her life on a deserted road. Her wispy-thin saree sticking to her like clingfilm, she dashes into a police station, screaming. Her husband, she says, is going to kill her. She is Rani (Taapsee Pannu), currently married to Abhimanyu (Sunny Kaushal), a compounder. But at the police station, Rani encounters questions about her bloody past. Three years ago, in the 2021 film, Hasseen Dillruba, Rani was married to Rishu (Vikrant Massey) but had taken a lover, Neel. Things didn’t go as planned and she had struck Neel dead. And then she had helped cover up the murder with her husband’s severed arm.

Released a little over three years ago, the original Haseen Dillruba was tonally all over the place. It tried to take on at least three genres—crime noir, cringe comedy, and nineties Bollywood romance—and swung between them wildly. In the process, it made calamitous errors and ended up getting very little right. The sequel, Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba, seems to be aware of its predecessor’s mistakes. That likely explains why it sticks to one lane and doesn’t deviate too far from it. Alas, knowing why you have failed can only get you so far. You still need to know how to fix it. With Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba, the execution is as shoddy if not worse. The Netflix film seems to have zero understanding of cohesion and film structure.