TIFF 2025 | ‘Bayaan’ Movie Review: Huma Qureshi Thriller Examines Silence as Servitude

Bayaan, being a police procedural set in Rajasthan, begins with darkness and dread. We see rows and rows of women in a prayer hall, all of them clad in white, rapt in meditation, eyes closed and hands folded behind their heads. One of them gets up and skips downstairs. She sneaks into a dark, unguarded office room and, on tenterhooks, smuggles out an anonymous distress note: “Holy Father is abusing us at the commune. Help us.” It will be a while (at least as far as the girl is concerned) before her brave act alerts the authorities and initiates a central investigation. Delhi, for now, is far.

In Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s visually compelling yet somewhat basic thriller, Huma Qureshi stars as DSP Roohi Kartar, a second-generation cop sent in to the fictional town of Kirangarh, there to probe rape and sexual assault allegations against Maharaj (Chandrachur Singh), an influential spiritual leader. The godman’s calm, beatific visage peeks out from calendars and hoardings; he has the tranquil on-stage mein of Asaram Bapu — the Rajasthan setting and crucial details of the case roughly coincide, though the film does not name the rapist directly.

“Today is for rest,” the local chief insists upon Roohi’s arrival, grinning condescendingly and addressing her as ‘beta’ (Roohi’s father, played by Sachin Khedekar, is a veteran investigator; his legend shadows her everywhere). As Roohi discovers piecemeal, Maharaj has the local population under his spell, running charitable institutions and commanding unswerving reverence and zealotry among his adherents. A preliminary visit to his fort-like ashram gives us the picture: the women act shaky with trepidation, evidently abused and terrorised yet upholding a wall of silence.

Despite Udit Khurana’s moody, tense camerawork, there is not much suspense to be gleaned from a film like Bayaan, which works better as a portrait of mass indoctrination and cultures of silence than an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Roohi, unlike Sonakshi Sinha’s embedded crime-fighter in Dahaad, is an outsider—the film largely unfolds from her gaze, registering her horrors and shocks as though encountering this world for the first time. Qureshi gives it a sharp, at times stiff centre, and Mishra surrounds her with a terrific supporting cast: Sampa Mandal, Aditi Kanchal Singh and Swati Das stand out in their roles.

One simple, old-fashioned idea sings. From the beginning of the film, Maharaj is built up as an omniscient figure — the symbol of his cultish religious order adapts the All-Seeing Eye. The film, for an uncomfortable stretch of time, refuses to show us the monster. This did not pay off how I expected it to — a belated confrontation with Roohi is a dud — though it did compound the meaning and dread of a particular scene: a near-arrest, scuttled by the fury and noise of utensils being banged. When last was a large mass of people similarly bewitched?

Bayaan had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)