‘O’ Romeo’: Blood, and little else

Vishal Bhardwaj has never cared for groundedness. His cinema usually smells of damp timber and doomed love — velvet longing stitched into smoke. With ‘O’ Romeo’, he keeps the smoke but mislays the poetry.

Reuniting with his ‘Haider’ muse Shahid Kapoor, Bhardwaj plunges into the organised-crime underbelly of the mid-’90s Mumbai. The plunge is spirited; the splash excessive. Barely 30 minutes into my 11 am show, my appetite had retreated: violence preens as scabs are zoomed into, and obscenities flung like confetti. The film’s fake blood budget could bankroll a modest French film; here it gleams without metaphor, without mercy.

Drawn from Hussain Zaidi’s ‘Queens of Mumbai’, the film follows Ustraa (Kapoor), a dandy hitman who swaps knives for a straight razor — yes, the ustraa. The camera lingers shamelessly as he carves through ears, mouths, entire heads — you name it, he’ll chop it.

There are flashes of old Bhardwaj mischief: fish suspended in liquor bottles, a gun-shaped decanter, Ustraa soaking in a bathtub at sea, a cowboy hat perched on him like a dare.

In these moments, the film winks — fever-dream cinema asking you to read between the lines. Then it lunges back into biology-defying brawls. A theatre-set massacre unfolds to Madhuri Dixit’s ‘Dhak Dhak Karne Laga’, with identically bald men in matching T-shirts arriving in convenient batches to be killed. Subtlety exits. So does logic.

The ostensible plot concerns grieving widow Afsha (Triptii Dimri), avenging her husband Mehboob (Vikrant Massey), once accountant to Spain-based underworld supreme Jalal (Avinash Tiwary), modelled after Dawood Ibrahim.

Ustraa, Jalal’s former aide, falls for Afsha and aids her vendetta. Performances rescue what they can: Kapoor, sometimes teetering towards caricature, commits gamely; Dimri is the film’s bruised heartbeat, carving dignity out of carnage.

She wears Afsha like womanhood incarnate, mapping her steady fall into bleaker emotional depths.

Nana Patekar — brilliant as ever — plays Intelligence officer Ismail Khan, the man who coolly deploys Ustraa for fresh bouts of sanctioned savagery.

Every exchange between Khan and Ustraa simmers into a faintly homoerotic duel of dominance: Khan prowls, asserts, withholds; Ustraa bristles, postures, submits. And both Kapoor and Patekar are far too shrewd to resist the current.

Doing more than what the script allows, Tiwary fashions Jalal into a figure both charismatic and daunting, domineering to the point of delirium, striding through a fever-dream — and quite possibly borderline offensive — version of the Spanish countryside.

Jalal throws masquerade parties for villagers, shouts “Ay Caramba” in a horrible accent at bullfights, and is a matador himself. As his mentally fragile wife Rabia, Tamannaah Bhatia is underserved.

Spoiler ahead: it is revealed that the otherwise blood-thirsty Ustraa quits working for Jalal after finding out that he was in cahoots with the ISI. Because, in Bollywood, when in doubt, bash Pakistan.

Painfully, only glimpses of the classic Bhardwaj grammar surface: Afsha’s wink before the “qubool hai” to her beloved; Rabia painting blood blue after a stillbirth; casual French peppered in by Ustraa’s men.

Stretched across three gruelling hours, ‘O’ Romeo’ feels less tragedy than market study — what Bollywood presumes audiences crave in the wake of the chest-thumping success of films like ‘Animal’.

That a feared mastermind is named Ustraa may be the film’s sharpest joke — accidentally so.

And therein lies the ache: beneath the arterial spray and aftershave-scented excess, you glimpse a better film trying, and failing, to breathe.