Bataa, kitne qatl kiye tune? Bataa, kitna mazaa aaya… kitne sikko mein beche murde? Bataa, kitna kamaa laaya?
(Tell me, how many lives did you take? Tell me, did you have fun… What price did the corpses fetch? Tell me, how much did you earn?)
Rahul Bhat as Anurag Kashyap’s titular protagonist, Kennedy, walks into his nondescript Mumbai home as any normal person after a day job would, with those words filling up the background. Except that Kennedy is no normal person with a day job. As the lines suggest, he is really a contract killer who used to be a cop, when he was known as Uday Shetty.
Kennedy is not for all
Kashyap’s long-in-waiting Kennedy, which finally saw a streaming drop for public viewing in India this weekend, marks the prolific filmmaker’s return to neo-noir after about half a decade of exploring more mainstream themes.
Kennedy is a moody film. It’s not for everyone, you realise, as a slow-paced story tries to dissect a dystopian world as devoid of hope as the film’s hero. The plot unfolds sometime in the Covid years, with Uday doubling as a cabbie. The mandatory mask hides half of his face – as well as that of most other characters – all through. The mask literally becomes a symbol of the world of Kennedy – people in his line of work don’t reveal emotions or intent in their entirety.
Kashyap has tried to craft Kennedy differently from past attempts in the neo-noir genre such as No Smoking, Ugly, Bombay Velvet and Raman Raghav 2.0. His new film is more than introspective, almost bordering on nihilism, as it explores the mind of an assassin who struggles not to lose his sanity.
Yet there is something tragically poetic about Uday’s turmoil. His freefall – from a policeman once in control to one who’s wrecked after a personal loss (cliched, true) – is best described in the lines of William Wordsworth that appear at the start of the film’s credits:
We poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end,
Despondency and madness.
Kashyap doesn’t waste time in defining Uday Shetty’s frame of mind. “Itne logon ko jaan se maara hai, ki ginti bhi yaad nahin (I’ve taken so many lives that I’ve lost count),” goes an early monologue.
In many ways, Uday’s unravelling reminds of Michael Fassbender’s assassin in the 2023 David Fincher film, The Killer. Although different in plot and characterisation, the neo-noir tone that Kashyap sets up in Kennedy has a likeness. You could, of course, say such thematic vibes are not exclusive to Fincher’s film. Assassins of the cinematic genre have largely dwelled in a similar world of bleakness.
Neo-noir, vintage Kashyap
A look at some of Anurag Kashyap’s earlier experiments with neo-noir reveals he has had a slant to utilise the genre to explore different types of storytelling. In his landmark 2007 film, No Smoking, neo-noir becomes a tool to create surrealism. One of Kashyap’s darkest and most accomplished works, the John Abraham-starrer about a man addicted to smoking is loaded with heavy Kafkaesque commentary.
The world Kashyap sets up with his 2014 film, Ugly, would seem less experimental than No Smoking, but it is infinitely more cynical. Although conventional in its premise of a young girl gone missing, Ugly departs from the usual kidnap story and uses neo-noir storytelling to lead to a horrific ending that leaves the audience with a sense of despair.
Kashyap would revisit the neo-noir genre with Bombay Velvet the very next year. Starring Ranbir Kapoor and Anushka Sharma, and riding massive hype besides a rumoured budget of over Rs 110 crore, the retro-noir crime drama has commercially been the filmmaker’s most ambitious project yet. The blend of stylish noir and generic gangster drama, however, was not enough to cover up for a screenplay that catered neither wholly to mainstream fans nor offbeat addicts. Despite its fascinating premise about Mumbai of the sixties as a megapolis undergoing metamorphosis, Bombay Velvet crashed.
By the time Kashyap released Raman Raghav 2.0 (known as Psycho Raman in some markets) in 2016, he had become a master of the neo-noir game: Keep it within budget and serve it with shock factor. Reminiscent of European noir classics, the film is based on Raman Raghav, a real-life killer in Mumbai of the 1960s. Kashyap uses the element of noir to set up a world seeped in moral ambiguity, where the law and the lawless get tangled, in the cat-and-mouse saga of a serial killer (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and a corrupt policeman (Vicky Kaushal).
Mainstream with a twist
Kennedy, a slow-burn crime drama with thriller elements, comes more than half a decade after Raman Raghav 2.0. Anurag Kashyap spent the years in between toying with ideas that were more mainstream – conceptually, at least.
There was the boxing drama Mukkabaaz and love triangle Manmarziyaan in 2018. The quirky suspense drama Choked (2021) was followed by the sci-fi thriller Dobaaraa in 2022 and the teenybopper musical romance Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat the next year. Nishaanchi was released in 2025, though it was completed after Kennedy.
With Anurag Kashyap, of course, there’s always a twist in the tale – each of his mainstream attempts have been about trying to add a generic spin, too. But that’s another story.
