‘Kennedy’: Sinister, sublime, noir done right

Like an alarming number of Indian films I’ve seen in recent months, Anurag Kashyap’s ‘Kennedy’ opens with a scandalising murder. Yet what follows is nothing like the rest of them. Nor is it quite like the cinema we have come to expect from Kashyap — though it flirts with familiarity. Chances are, it resembles little you’ve seen before.

A rasping voiceover slices through pitch black. It belongs to Uday Shetty (Rahul Bhat): hitman, insomniac, officially dead cop. From this void, Kashyap inks a noir steeped not merely in shadow but in the rot of a system buckling under a pandemic. Covid here is central, intrusive, perpetually more unmasked than the characters themselves are allowed to be. Kashyap refuses the comfort of a narrative that exists outside its moment.

This opening monologue is perhaps the most syllables Bhat is granted at once. Dialogue is sparse. In its place: ambition-soaked Mumbai streets, moody opera, shards of Hindi poetry and aggressively auto-tuned rap. Men in oriental garb commandeer stages in stray interludes, heightening the deliberate cacophony.

A quote from William Wordsworth — on poets descending from gladness into despondency and madness — ushers us into a plush Mumbai apartment building. The air is musky, romantic, faintly psychedelic. The murder unfolds with aestheticised perversity, oddly reminiscent of the opening of Rihanna’s music video for ‘B**ch Better Have My Money’.

Now operating under the alias “Kennedy”, Uday poses as a cab driver for an upmarket ride-hailing app. Once a regular cop with a regular family, he nurtured a distinctly irregular hobby: manic killing sprees. Declared a liability, he is dead on paper — stripped of khaki and kin alike — yet continues to perform dirty work for corrupt Police Commissioner Rashid Khan (Mohit Takalkar), whose “extra income” dwindles in a pandemic economy.

No one is spared: not innocents, not children, not the elderly. But violence accrues a reckoning. The dead trail him in broad daylight, visible and insistent. Kashyap does not reinvent the wheel — we have seen ghosts of guilt before, in ‘The Sixth Sense’ and sitcom ‘Not Dead Yet’ — yet he folds it into his own fever dream.

A countdown to ‘The Day’ primes us for rupture as Uday quietly sabotages the commissioner. As Uday, Bhat delivers a performance of brooding restraint and domineering ache, his silences doing the heavy lifting as dialogue is absent.

Throughout, Uday repeatedly encounters Charlie (Sunny Leone), a Vancouver-based woman sculpted out of hair pomade and presumably the most divine pharmaceutical cocktail known to man.

Introduced as stereotype, she gradually reveals herself as layered — navigating the ownership of femininity and the cost of love.

It is an easy role for Leone, who delivers perhaps the finest performance of her career; she dances with Charlie, traces her edges, and sketches her downfall with effortless ease — their chemistry the film’s most palpable current.

One unwarranted moment — Uday grabbing Charlie by the neck to extort information — tinges with misplaced sexual undertone, risking parody.

Elsewhere, parody is deliberate and inconspicuous. Animated TV journalists shriek. Unmasked men harass another at an egg stall over Covid norms. A stray voiceover muses on those who own everything — water, electricity, media. On an unrelated note, the film had its Indian fest premiere at the Reliance-backed Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in 2023.

By the time the credits roll, the Wordsworthian arc feels quietly inverted. Uday did not begin in gladness, yet something approaching moral clarity flickers at the edges of his ruin.