There is a particular kind of woman that Hindi cinema understands very well. She is resilient but not angry. Ambitious but not ruthless. Wronged but still fundamentally good. Even when she breaks rules, she does it in aesthetically pleasing ways — a cigarette, a lover, maybe a dramatic monologue about freedom before the film gently escorts her back toward morality. The women in Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s System do not care for this arrangement.
Sonakshi Sinha and Jyothika play women who understand exactly how power works: who inherits it, who performs it, who cleans up after it. One carries the exhaustion of legacy and inherited power; the other has the dangerous clarity of someone with very little left to lose. Between them is the film’s central idea that maybe morality itself is a luxury afforded only to people protected from consequences.
For a filmmaker whose cinema has often been associated with warmth and middle-class optimism, System feels startlingly unsentimental. The hope here is bruised and conditional. It exists, but only after rage has had its say. When I mention this to Tiwari, she disagrees immediately. “I think what has changed is not hope,” she says. “But the method through which people try to reach it.”
When we speak, she keeps circling back to systems and invisible hierarchies that decide who gets trusted immediately and who has to earn legitimacy over and over again. She never names it directly, but there’s an acute awareness of how differently the industry often treats her successes compared to those of her filmmaker husband, Nitesh Tiwari. It’s amusing to her how even credibility appears to have a gender. “Perception management is reality today,” she says. “Some people walk into rooms already being trusted. Others have to prove themselves again and again.”
Even now, despite a filmography that has carved out a distinct emotional register in Hindi cinema, Tiwari says she still feels like “an afterthought” in certain spaces. “I may give 100 out of 100 to my work,” she says plainly, “But I’ll still be the second choice somewhere.”
It’s this understanding of class, not as wealth but as access or ease, that gives System its bite. The film is full of people calculating their distance from power. Nobody is entirely innocent. Nobody is entirely wrong either. “Everyone, in their own spaces, feels correct,” Tiwari says. “So how do you quantify morality?”
Tiwari is particularly interested in inherited baggage — what she calls “generational karma”. The phrase sounds spiritual at first, until you realise she’s talking about emotional inheritance. Children carrying the unfinished anxieties of their parents. The ambitions their mothers buried. The humiliations their fathers normalised.
That idea extends into her casting too. Sonakshi Sinha, she says, was always the first choice because she wanted someone who understood power intimately. “She has seen both sides,” Tiwari says, alluding to conversations around privilege and nepotism. “But she’s become so comfortable in her own skin now that she genuinely doesn’t care about the noise anymore.” There’s admiration in the way she talks about Sinha and her self-possession.
With Jyotika, Tiwari found something else: stillness. The actor spends large stretches of the film simply observing, withholding, letting thought travel across her face without explaining it away through dialogue. “You need actors who know life,” Tiwari says. “You cannot have superficial acting here.”
Even Ashutosh Gowariker’s casting is slyly subversive. Tiwari uses his inherent warmth against him, allowing affability to slowly harden into entitlement. “He told me he wanted to be in an Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari film,” she says, sounding genuinely moved by the memory.
But perhaps the most revealing part of speaking to Tiwari is realising how minutely she thinks through emotional space. She doesn’t talk about characters as abstractions. She talks about nail polish colours. Fabric textures. Furniture placement. Silence.
Sonakshi’s character wears dark grey nail paint throughout the film. Not black. Not bright red. Grey. Structured silhouettes, muted tones, straight lines. Jyothika’s character, meanwhile, is always covered in embroidery and colour — brightness that is deployed almost defensively. “Movies are like writing a book,” Tiwari says. “Every scene is like a paragraph.”
And in her paragraphs, silence matters. When I mention how unusual it feels now to watch a streaming film willing to linger — on faces, on pauses, on emotional discomfort — she interrupts almost immediately. “Thank you for noticing that,” she says. “We are cutting films like Instagram Reels now,” she says. “And you can’t cut films like Reels because films are supposed to be nurtured.” She isn’t romanticising the past. Tiwari understands audiences have changed. Attention spans have changed. The architecture of viewing itself has changed. Everything now competes with notifications.
But she also believes something vital is disappearing in the process: our ability to sit with stillness. “We have become impatient with our own stillness,” she says. The irony is that streaming — the very ecosystem often blamed for shrinking attention spans — has also become the only space where filmmakers can attempt this kind of storytelling. Tiwari says System was conceived directly for Amazon Prime Video, which backed the project almost immediately.
Still, even streaming is beginning to resemble social media now: increasingly governed by algorithms, retention graphs and completion rates. Texture is becoming harder to justify. Silence, even harder. Tiwari knows this. But unlike many filmmakers currently paralysed by the changing landscape, she sounds energised by the need to evolve. “As storytellers, we cannot keep making ‘Part 10’ of the same emotional experience,” she says. “If I don’t evolve, I will die as a storyteller.”
Later, when I ask her about artificial intelligence and the anxiety currently haunting every creative industry conversation, her answer is unexpectedly calm. AI, she says, can assist with scale and logistics. Mountains. Deserts. Expensive impossible landscapes. But emotion, she insists, remains human. “For AI, a tear is just a reference image,” she says. “For a storyteller, a tear carries memory, shame, longing, history.”