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While Daayra invests a lot into Prithviraj Sukumaran’s Raman, the same attention isn’t extended to Kareena Kapoor’s Ajooni. She also gets a relatively lesser screen-time.
Meghna Gulzar’s Daayra starring Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran is all set to release on September 18.
DaayraA
3/5
Starring: Kareena Kapoor Khan, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Kshitee Jog and Jitendra JoshiDirector: Meghna GulzarMusic: Amit Trivedi
Daayra Movie Review: There’s a peculiar tendency to conflate the importance of a film’s subject with the quality of the film itself. The moment a film tackles a serious social issue, questioning its filmmaking can feel almost sacrilegious as though the gravity of the subject automatically lends the film depth. But an important issue does not necessarily make for a seamless film.
A film can be socially relevant and still be unconvincing. Meghna Gulzar’s Daayra arguably falls into this very trap. Don’t get us wrong. This isn’t a clumsy film. It has its heart in the right place. It has a solid intent. It wants to spark a conversation. It wants to unsettle us. But the problem is that much of it gets lost under the weight of its own aspirations. By the end of it, the intent fizzles out.
Daayra opens with a bunch of people taking to the streets singing eulogies for Teerthana police station’s DCP Raman Kumar. In a successful encounter operation, he along with his team had shot down four rapists, who had left 24-year-old Ragini Poojari’s charred remains near a highway in Delhi. But a different and dubious narrative erupts when Raman attends a press conference.
We soon learn that the encounter was staged by him as an attempt to channel his own rage towards the rapists, who had destroyed a young life and that this is the third time that he has done something similar. Human Rights Commission soon files a bunch of PILs and to get to the bottom of the matter, an SIT is set-up, with DCP Ajooni Kohli tasked with leading the probe.
Ajooni and Raman embody the opposing philosophies of justice. While Raman believes in an iron-fisted approach to justice, taking matters into his own hands, Ajooni represents the opposite of that. She believes in the judicial system and trusts the law to punish those responsible even if it turns into a time-consuming affair.
After killing the rapists, when Raman says that the law simply did its duty, Ajooni’s of the opinion that the police isn’t the law. And this ideological conflict is precisely what forms the heart of the story, or at least, that seems to be the intent of Meghna and her writers – Sima Agarwal and Yash Keswani. The problem is that this conflict remains more clearly stated than meaningfully explored.
Their opposing approaches often come across as a convenient narrative device rather than a fully developed moral debate. For a conflict this central to the story, Daayra needed to put these two worldviews under greater pressure, forcing both characters to confront the limitations and consequences of their respective ideas of justice.
In the backdrop, Ajooni is also dealing with the court proceedings following her father, a retired judge, was shot on court premises a few months back. Her faith in the judiciary to deliver justice for him gives greater context to and reinforces the ideology she now stands by. But this subplot too remains largely underexplored.
It’s also confusing as to why the characters of Raman and Ajooni, who are a part of a gritty, realistic and nuanced live-in world – are given a quintessential, template-like and starry slow-motion introductions. But credit lies where it’s due. Raman and Ajooni are cops who don’t belong to the larger-than-life Bollywood universe. They don’t defy gravity, they don’t represent brawn and they don’t roar.
It’s interesting that Ajooni is never masculinised in order to be taken seriously (unlike Mardaani’s Rani Mukerji). Ajooni remains distinctly feminine and it’s her softer choices, empathy and faith in the system that shape her strength and unyielding toughness. The writers deserve credit for proving that a woman doesn’t need to shed her femininity to command authority!
Daayra has its moments where it shines bright. In some others, it makes you uncomfortable. For instance, there’s a scene that showcases a graphic sexual violence – men taking turns to assault the body and the spirit of a 24-year-old girl. It’s gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, infuriating and deeply disturbing. Daayra also includes references to the juvenile perpetrator in the Nirbhaya case.
Based on multiple real incidents, the allusion appears to be designed to ground the story in a horrifyingly familiar reality, making its subject matter feel even more immediate and unsettling. Needless to say, this film is an urgent watch. This is a story that needs to be told, not just once, but again and again, until we stop looking away.
As for the performances, Prithviraj Sukumaran takes the trophy home. He underplays ACP Raman and his rage – towards perpetrators and lackadaisical cops, who turn a deaf ear to complaints about missing girls. He’s stoic, decides to not play to the gallery even during moments of defeat and helplessness and yet leaves an indelible impact.
But a weak link when it comes to characterisation is the lack of ambiguity, which also affects the film’s tension. Daayra makes Raman’s position clear fairly early on. Both Raman and Ajooni are straight-arc characters. Because of this, the film, instead of becoming a morally ambiguous cat-and-mouse dynamic, remains a fairly straightforward clash between two clearly defined ideas of justice.
Despite this, Prithviraj’s Raman shines. It’s Kareena Kapoor Khan’s Ajooni who ultimately bears the brunt of the writing. Kareena does a good job with the material she’s given. The film, however, does her a disservice. While the film invests a lot into Raman, the same attention isn’t extended to Ajooni. There is a noticeable imbalance in the writing.
She also gets a relatively less screen-time. By the end of it, you’ll find yourself becoming disproportionately invested in one character, which may not be the most perfect outcome in a film that boasts of objectivity. What also feels particularly out of place in case of Ajooni is the perpetual smile plastered across her face, almost as though she knows more than she lets on.
The smile seems to promise a layer of mystery and revelation that never really materialises. And then comes the much-awaited final confrontation between Raman and Ajooni. This is a scene where Daayra should’ve truly caught fire as the set-up had promised. Instead, their face-off is surprisingly muted. The pay-off is sadly underwhelming.
What should have been the film’s most charged and thought-provoking sequence ultimately lands with a thud. As for the rest of the cast, Kshitee Jog delivers a stupendous performance. She’s superb as the victim’s mother, bringing a heartbreaking vulnerability to a woman consumed by grief, fear, rage and helplessness. The fragility of her character is palpable in every frame.
For the most part, Daayra manages to turn its gaze towards the uneasy line between revenge and justice while also examining media trials. Its ideological clash makes for a compelling idea and it could’ve given the film a far more layered moral complexity. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always put those beliefs through enough consequences to make the debate truly resonate.
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Ask News18The crime thriller Daayra is scheduled to be released in theatres on September 18, 2026.
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Titas Chowdhury is a Special Correspondent at News18 Showsha. She writes about cinema, music and gender in cinema. Interviewing actors and filmmakers, writing about latest trends in showbiz and bringi…Read More
September 17, 2026, 07:30 IST
