Vintage Kashyap surfaces in bursts of violent musicality and nocturnal mood in Kennedy. The plot, however, lingers a step behind the filmmaking. The result is a stylish revenge thriller that fails to meet its gaps.
About an hour into Kennedy, writer-director Anurag Kashyap springs a sequence so wickedly orchestrated that it alters the film’s grammar in an instant. In the scene, former cop Uday Shetty (Rahul Bhat) massacres a local politician and his family. The violence is merciless, yet staged with such choreographic precision — pauses, glances, the geometry of bodies collapsing across rooms — that it lands as shockingly comic as it is brutal.
I found myself on the edge, trying to register each movement before the film cut away, laughter catching in the throat alongside revulsion. It’s filmmaking that is propelled by musicality, not moral calculus; by spectacle, not realism — the kind of moment that exists to stun and awe, not merely to serve its narrative purpose. It is also a register that Kashyap hasn’t tapped into in recent years.
Premiering out of competition at Cannes in 2023 and arriving in India over two years later, Kashyap’s grim neo-noir revenge thriller follows Shetty, who drifts through Mumbai’s criminal underbelly like a rumour refusing burial. Set during the pandemic, Kennedy introduces Shetty as a man erased from official existence. Six years ago, after crossing a line even his corrupt department could not publicly defend, the police declared him dead and quietly repurposed him into a deniable operative, a night-bound executioner deployed where paperwork cannot reach.
An atmospheric mood piece
Now working as a contract killer under the titular Kennedy, he moves through Mumbai in masks and borrowed identities, driving a luxury cab by day and stalking targets after dark. Many of the killings are commissioned by his former boss, who uses the fiction of Shetty’s death as administrative camouflage. But beneath the assignments runs a private vendetta: Shetty is searching for Saleem, the gangster connected to the death of his son and the collapse of his family life, a pursuit that threads through the film’s fractured timeline.
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The film’s narrative — unfolding across five nights — advances less in clean progression than in loops and detours: ghosts appear, conspiracies widen, acquaintances surface only to be absorbed into the body count. Charlie (Sunny Leone), a woman living in the same building as one of his targets, becomes intermittently entangled in his orbit as Shetty surveils his estranged family from a distance he cannot close.
In sketching corrupt police machinery, the film also gestures toward the complicity of politicians and billionaires. Yet the critique never moves beyond recognition — it identifies rot without interrogating it. The pandemic setting supplies some of the film’s driest humour, especially in a brief cab ride featuring Varun Grover as a fretful, talkative passenger whose anxieties about the virus collide with the silent menace of the man behind the wheel. Yet as motives multiply and timelines overlap, the story grows denser without becoming deeper; revelations arrive, but rarely sharpen our understanding of the man at its centre.
Kennedy marks Kashyap and Rahul Bhat’s third collaboration since Ugly (2013) and Dobaaraa (2022).
What carries Kennedy instead is craft, pushing it toward an atmospheric mood piece. Working with his regular cinematographer Sylvester Fonseca, Kashyap turns the city into a nocturnal grid of corridors — stairwells, terraces, parking lots — where bodies appear and disappear on cue. Fonseca keeps the camera at a distance, favouring sideways movement, so that action lands in measured beats, often led by sound rather than dialogue.
Even when the plot remains wafer-thin, the staging sustains attention: chases pivot on spatial trickery, confrontations hinge on timing, and silence functions like percussion. One chase captures that logic perfectly: Shetty abandons his car mid-pursuit, sprints up the staircases of a railway station with the police scrambling after him, only to loop back down and calmly drive off again. The thrill lies not in speed but in spatial misdirection — a gag built from geography — turning pursuit into choreography and briefly making the city itself part of the punchline.
Alive in sensation, hesitant in meaning
And then there is the score, which leans heavily on percussive pulse and sweeping orchestral swell — the latter recorded by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra — with Aamir Aziz and Raghav Bhatia (Boyblanck) injecting a restless urgency. Rather than telling you what Shetty feels, the songs dictate context, giving the film an operatic charge even when the writing stalls. The result is a film that feels more composed than written.
Kennedy marks Kashyap and Bhat’s third collaboration since Ugly (2013) and Dobaaraa (2022). Bhat’s performance fits the film’s design. His Shetty is almost emptied of affect — hollow eyes, guttural delivery, a face that rarely registers consequence — yet the opacity becomes watchable in itself. One extended flashback into his past that arrives near the film’s end proves more arresting than the mythology built around Shetty: as a policeman, he already possessed a disturbing appetite for killing, describing death not with horror but fascination. The film circles but never answers the question that is raised: Is he a psychopath, or merely a man whose violence found institutional permission? Kashyap refuses a diagnosis, and the refusal feels both like ambiguity and avoidance.
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Other elements fluctuate unevenly around Bhat. Leone’s presence pulls attention away from the film’s internal rhythm — whether intentionally or not — and her early scenes are mounted with a surprising awkwardness that clashes with Kashyap’s otherwise controlled staging. The supporting cast fades as soon as their scenes do, functioning more as plot points than people. Which is to say Kennedy thrives on sequences and set-pieces, not characters and dynamics.
All of which makes it even more frustrating that Kashyap hasn’t yet confronted another recurring problem: duration. His films increasingly sprawl past the point their material can sustain, and Kennedy is no exception. At 148 minutes, the looseness isn’t just indulgent; it actively blunts impact. A tighter cut would have sharpened both mood and meaning. Instead, the overextended runtime becomes a familiar liability, a directorial habit now edging from signature into concern.
The result is a film that repeatedly demonstrates a filmmaker rediscovering a meter he instinctively understands: tactile violence, musical construction, and pulpy nocturnal atmosphere. Yet it never fully consolidates these flashes into a coherent whole. Kennedy fascinates in stretches and stalls in between — a work alive in sensation, hesitant in meaning, and forever almost arriving at the film it clearly wants to be.
