‘Azaad’ Movie Review: Dear Bollywood, Stop Horsing Around

Director: Abhishek Kapoor 
Writers: Ritesh Shah, Abhishek Kapoor, Suresh Nair 
Cast: Aaman Devgan, Rasha Thadani, Ajay Devgn, Diana Penty, Mohit Malik, Piyush Mishra 
Language: Hindi

Azaad is fit, handsome, muscular and agile. His flowy hair is the talk of the town. He plays hard to get. He looks away and sighs if he isn’t interested. He loves his whisky neat — and straight from the bottle. He sits on a bed when he’s tired. He loses his appetite when he’s sad; he eats only if his food is spiked with alcohol. He has expensive taste. He farts in a closed room. He isn’t afraid to defy outdated perceptions of masculinity: his eyes go glassy when he gets a whiff of his late companion’s scent from a turban. He remembers the day they met and necked. He remembers their adolescent-love song together: “Ab jeene ki koi wajah toh hai” (I now have a reason to live). He isn’t ashamed of weeping. He likes dancing. He loves racing, too. Azaad is an expressive action hero; this film is his big-budget launch vehicle. There’s only one problem though: Azaad is a horse.

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Watching an interspecies love story that has no idea it’s an interspecies love story wasn’t on my 2025 bingo card. But here we are. Abhishek Kapoor’s Azaad marks the debut of Aaman Devgan as an unruly 1920s stable boy in British-ruled India who is mentored by a famous dacoit (played by his uncle, Ajay Devgn), then inherits the rebel’s grieving horse, and then sways between being a scruffy Lagaan hero (he challenges a zamindar’s evil son to a contest that puts his village on the line) and a drifter Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar hero (the contest is a long race in which they ride horses instead of cycles — but one can’t tell the difference). Azaad also marks the big-screen debut of Rasha Thadani, daughter of Raveena Tandon, as the zamindar’s golden-hearted daughter who helps the stable boy go from unstable to stable (his words, not mine). But the movie is not about a young couple horsing around. The people are incidental, like animated extras in a crowd scene.

In fact, the first human-to-human touch occurs around two hours in. It’s really about an alcoholic horse who rediscovers the (non-alcoholic) spirit to live after losing his soulmate. He has “mane”-character energy. He likes to believe that he’s an outcast descendant of the white horse from Asoka (2001), the moody racehorse of Seabiscuit (2003), the moodier racehorse of Secretariat (2010), the introspective BoJack Horseman, and the dark horse from Django Unchained (2012). Have I missed any? Maybe Gabbar Singh’s neglected horse from Sholay (1975), too.

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Needless to say, the film is so obsessed with this neatly rendered beast that it forgets to touch grass. Even if one were to view it as a platonic Disney-coded adventure, there are problems. With its queer-curious staging and camera angles, it creates romantic and psychosexual chemistry between the animal and the strapping men. At one point, young Azaad senses that the older man has been thrashed and tied up a few feet above the ground. He breaks out of his stable, gallops towards the guy, sees him tied up and tenderly rubs his waist — the camera cuts from the man’s delirious face to the horse’s emotional eyes peering up. It’s a bit creepy. I like ambitious and go-for-broke storytelling as much as the next film critic, but there’s a thin line between witty fantasy and unwitting parody. Ironically, the horse-centric visual effects are pretty good, but the rest of the environment feels like an afterthought.

It also gets my goat that nobody behaves like they should. Horses behave like both black canines (he’s one neigh short of barking and playing fetch) and bright humans (he’s one neigh short of putting on surgical gloves and a mask when his ‘friend’ is shot). Humans behave like statues and motion posters. Hyenas behave like the wolves from Twilight. Britishers behave like hyenas. The freedom struggle behaves like it doesn’t exist. Rustic intonations and accents behave like they stem from upscale Juhu and Bandra. The music — featuring one random Holi song and another drunken ‘item’ song that freely sexualises a 19-year-old girl—behaves like it cares.

The film behaves like multiple films patched together without tonal continuity: when the boy solemnly goes to inform a woman that her lover is dead, he pops into the next room to flirt with his flame (not the horse) in a romcom-styled moment. The second half, which features an hour-long bonding montage between the stable boy and the sulky beast, behaves like it's the originality that mainstream Hindi cinema is missing. And I behave like Azaad is just another misfire. As a child, the tears that sensitive dog Moti shed when his master died in Teri Meherbaniyan (1985) broke my heart. As an adult, the tears of a woke horse have broken my head. There is no turning back. My hooves hurt. They’re behaving like feet.