‘Assi’ Movie Review: A Social Drama That Expects Complete Surrender

Anubhav Sinha’s latest, Assi (“80”), is a uniquely uncomfortable film to watch. There are two reasons. The first one is by design. The title lays it out: approximately 80 women are sexually assaulted in India every day. The film is built to convey the full force of this number. It revolves around one such ‘case,’ opening with what looks like a regular day in the life of Parima (Kani Kusruti), a Kerala-born schoolteacher residing in Delhi with her husband (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) and son. There’s a tangible undercurrent to her middle-class routine; something bad is around the corner. While returning from a staff party one night, it happens: five men pull her into a moving car and rape her for hours, repeatedly and brutally. She is dumped on a railway track. It’s 2025, but the ghost of 2012 hangs heavy. It’s national news. The law-enforcement, trial-by-media and justice mechanisms take over.

The story’s many facets emerge. The investigation falters. Arrests are made. Bribes are paid. Evidence is tampered. Witnesses unravel. The characters unfold. Parima’s husband Vinay looks lost, but he has a son to protect. The fiery prosecution lawyer, Raavi (Taapsee Pannu), goes about her job in court and outside. Her disillusioned and grieving brother-in-law, Kartik (Kumud Mishra), is Vinay’s friend and colleague. A corrupt investigating officer (Jatin Goswami) struggles with his morality. A stern and observant female judge (Revathi) presides. A smug defense lawyer (Satyajit Sharma) unleashes the male gaze on unsuspecting witnesses. The father of one of the perpetrators (Manoj Pahwa) scrambles to protect his son. Mob violence threatens to escalate. And Parima slowly inches back to reality; the bruises may heal, but the scars are permanent. She wants to be ready, but society is not.

Assi is narratively difficult because it strives to tell difficult truths. It offers no easy solutions, resolutions, binary conflicts or even the illusion of hope. It is partially a courtroom drama where there is no such thing as victory, defeat, spectacle or justice. More than once, a character wonders if one verdict can alter the social architecture of a country steeped in patriarchy and sexual violence. More than once, there’s a sense that the system is rigged against survivors who dare to come forward. The film chooses to cover dimensions on both sides of the law, not just the trauma of the family or the determination of their lawyer. Even the mentality of an abuser’s mother is mined. There is complicity and the normalisation of misogyny in the smallest of details: like a procession dancing to an ‘expressive’ number like Fevicol Se, all the female teachers jiving to a similar Bollywood song early on, a father indirectly advising his accused son to have affairs and visit brothels as better options, a male lawyer hinting at the ‘loose’ character of a teen witness, or a kid asking why the strangers who helped his mother aren’t asking for money.

It also interrogates the rhythm of courtroom narratives; the case is choppy, uncertain, unrewarding and far from seamless. There’s a vigilante angle that plays out — like fiction trying to invade reality — so that the culture of cinema peddling revenge as a form of heroism can be questioned. In short, Assi offers a messy 360-degree view of the situation, insisting that it cannot afford to be about any single situation. It leaves no stone unturned (even plot-wise) to imply that such headline-making violence stems from decades of invisibilised abuse: the kind that happens in broad daylight, in marriages and families, sheltered by the walls of domesticity and parenthood. It takes the harder route of suggesting that the rot is so deep that even films don’t have the luxury of being subtle anymore.

Ironically, that’s the second reason Assi is so uncomfortable to watch. It feels like the kind of movie that judges you for questioning its tenor. It’s also the sort of heavy-handed filmmaking that cites urgency and intent if its craft is scrutinised. If it doesn’t work, it’s as if we can hear a voice say: “it’s not me, it’s you”. For instance, I found the incident too provocatively shot and staged (especially some camera angles), but I know any such reaction might be met with: “yes, the provocations are deliberate, it’s the only way people will listen”. Or: “yes, that’s how sick the male gaze is!”. Or: “it’s time we stop looking away”. Or: “how can you expect nuance when the crime is anything but nuanced?”. At another point, a survivor does the math and wonders how almost 35000 women are subjected to violence every year (“enough to fill a stadium”) with a resigned smile. At another point, school-children are allowed into the courtroom so that they learn of the harsh realities of abuse; “do better than us,” the judge tells them.

At another point, when Vinay is asked why he brings his boy to the court for every hearing, he simply says he’s had to grow up fast. It’s a sad confession, until it becomes a statement. The child sees and hears too much right till the final shot, which is the film’s way of proving that sheltering boys from the worst consequences of manhood is the problem. In the scene where the father advises his son to find other ‘alternatives’ for his sexual frustration, his clunky food analogy falls on the ears of a female street-vendor who makes sure we see the disgust on her face. The vigilante angle is supposed to be a parallel story, but it’s so strangely inserted that it looks like a dream sequence instead; it almost appears to exist in isolation, unconnected to the rest. Even though real-world ramifications are mentioned, it never quite seems like an actual thing. As a result, the second half just looks off, like it’s been edited and re-edited to be as uneven as possible (even this can be cited as deliberate: “you see, justice is not clean”). The acting is very affected; you can tell that everyone is performing a service as much as a role. Kani Kusruti has the difficult part as the survivor cursed with the stigma of surviving — the complexity of her character is however flattened by the film’s commitment to volume and bleeding-heart resolve. The climax points out to the futility of being preachy, but the screenplay suggests that there’s no choice except to be preachy.

The biggest symptom of this is the film breaking the fourth wall with a Dhurandhar-coded gimmick: a red screen with white font appears every 20 minutes to remind us that a real-time assault is happening out there as we speak. It no longer feels like a creative choice after a point. It becomes hard to trust storytelling that refuses to trust itself. Hard-hitting, necessary, important and timely are some of the adjectives it invites at the cost of narrative dignity. Assi makes it clear that it’s more interested in instigating a sense of responsibility and guilt through devices that lie outside the realms of filmmaking. The language of activism is not new, but it reveals a lack of conviction in the tools and voices already available. Spelling out the message is not the problem; the need to puncture the medium to do so is. Most of all, the impassioned posturing and sledgehammer tone reflect a country where mainstream cinema often demands collective subservience rather than personal engagement. Assi and its sloganeering (“Eighty. Per Day. Every day”) indicate that Indian audiences need the shock treatment; anything less is futile. That the significance of a story is bigger than the art of storytelling. That some issues are so grave that we owe the makers our unconditional time and support. That if we criticize a movie, we are criticising the concept of humanity itself. That if we question its agenda, we are questioning a nation. Somewhere along the way, the screen in between is starting to dissipate. It’s true that films don’t have the luxury to be subtle anymore. But perhaps we’ve reached a stage where films don’t have the luxury of being films anymore.