Kennedy Review: Anurag Kashyap’s Noir Drama Is A Slow-Burning, Unsettling Portrait Of A Broken World
Anurag Kashyap’s Kennedy is not a film built for comfort. Disturbing, brutal, and deeply haunting, it follows a well-worn Kashyap tradition of holding a mirror to the darker corners of the society we inhabit. After making its rounds at international film festivals including Cannes the film has finally landed on Indian screens, now streaming on Zee5.
Rahul Bhat leads the film as an insomniac ex-cop burdened by a troubled past and a long trail of wrongs. The story unfolds against the eerie stillness of the COVID-19 pandemic empty roads, masked faces, and a world that feels suspended in collective dread a backdrop that adds another layer of unease to an already grim narrative.
A Different Kind of Kashyap Film
Fans familiar with Kashyap’s filmography will find Kennedy operating on a different frequency. His earlier works were politically loud, often chaotic, and carried a raw, occasionally glamorous energy. Kennedy, by contrast, is moody, tragic, and largely silent. There are no clear heroes or villains here only human beings weighed down by guilt and questionable choices, which remains a Kashyap constant but the execution this time is far more restrained and inward.
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What the Film Is About
Rahul Bhat plays Uday Shetty, an ex-cop the world believes to be dead, now living entirely off the grid. Haunted by his past, he moves through the night on a killing spree. The film peels back his story gradually revealing that he operates under the orders of a corrupt commissioner (Mohit Takalkar) and is driven, in part, by the need to avenge his son’s death. By day, or rather by night while the rest of the world sleeps, he works as a cab driver.
Society Through the Eyes of a Soulless Man
One of the film’s most striking sequences involves Kennedy witnessing an MLA being murdered — not by Kennedy himself, but by the MLA’s own son, who kills both his parents after they refuse to meet his demands. Kennedy watches. Then, without emotion, he kills the boy. The scene is cold. Clinical. It positions Kennedy less as an agent of violence and more as an observer of a society already rotting from within, one that extends far beyond corrupt political structures.
Yet beneath the hollow exterior lives a family man. Kennedy quietly funds the lives of his wife (Megha Burman) and daughter (Haripriya Manish Lodhia), watching them from a distance, unable to return. His own actions destroyed his family, and the loss of his son is the price he has paid.
Performances and Craft
Bhat carries the role with quiet authority. His eyes do the heavy lifting conveying pain, guilt, and emptiness without leaning on dramatic dialogue. It is a restrained, controlled performance that suits the film’s tone entirely.
Sunny Leone appears in a supporting role, and while her screen time is limited, it serves the narrative. Her smile and laughter carry an unsettling quality, and the film uses her character to expose the struggling reality beneath a glossy, polished surface.
Kashyap constructs this world with deliberate care. The pacing is slow intentionally, unhurriedly so. The film does not aim to grip in the conventional thriller sense. It asks for patience, and even then, it offers no easy rewards. What keeps a viewer engaged is a quieter kind of curiosity: what happened to this man? What made him this way? The film answers that question layer by layer, trailing backward through emotional trauma and moral collapse.
At two and a half hours, Kennedy is a demanding watch. Nearly every sequence carries the weight of another killing, yet violence shares the frame with emotion, and brutality is balanced just barely by feeling. The film closes not with resolution, but with darkness and a lingering sense of heaviness.
Kennedy is currently streaming on Zee5.