Atanu Bhuyan’s new Assamese film Khakee, released on February 27, is a politically charged police drama that has sparked both box-office runs and social-media backlash. Screened in 72 cinema halls across Assam in its first week, the film ran for three weeks in several towns before being replaced by Dhurandhar: The Revenge. Based on real-life events, Khakee foregrounds the pride and frustrations of police work while repeatedly steering its narrative toward an explicit pro-establishment agenda.
The film’s approach favors telling over showing. A late scene in which officers raid a godown is punctuated by the chowkidar peering through a half-open gate and a voice declaring “Ami police” — “We are police” — a moment Bhuyan uses to underline the film’s thesis that authority must be spoken into being. That insistence on verbal affirmation recurs throughout Khakee: characters regularly explain their motives and the moral logic behind their actions rather than allowing events to speak for themselves.
Khakee dramatizes several controversial incidents. One sequence reconstructs a custodial shooting-first presented as an escape attempt, then re-enacted to suggest the detained man was forced to run on the instructions of his superiors. Another episode follows the wife of the protagonist (Shreya Borthakur) as she is driven to despair by repeated thefts from her yard, a plotline the film resolves largely through exposition. These moments are staged and heightened in ways that make punitive measures feel justified, but they also reveal the film’s agenda-driven priorities.
Politically, the film does not hide its sympathies. Local parties are coded green (NPF) and saffron (IPP), yet the movie goes beyond visual shorthand and explicitly spells out party ideologies and motives. The screenplay interweaves anti-opposition barbs, anti-drug messaging, child marriage eradication, and other civic themes in a manner the reviewer likens more to a promotional address than to nuanced storytelling. This broad enumeration of issues gives Khakee the feel of a three-hour endorsement of the ruling regime rather than a balanced drama.
Technically, Khakee has notable strengths. Pradip Daimary’s cinematography includes a well-executed one-take inside a police station that captures past and present in a single spatial frame. Production design is strong, and Gitartha Sharmah earns a solid mention for his portrayal of a spoiled scion. Yet the film’s near three-hour runtime suffers from slack editing and uneven pacing, with a slow political first half that only finds sustained tension after the interval when it shifts toward a cop thriller.
Promotional choices compounded the controversy: the producers initially used AI-generated posters that many felt misrepresented actors and bore little relation to the film, and the release lacked a full trailer, offering only a teaser days before debut. Whether Khakee might have fared differently with subtler storytelling and firmer publicity remains an open question.
Original Source: https://nenow.in/uncategorized/film-review-half-good-mostly-bad-but-at-its-worst-when-it-tackles-politics.html
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Publish Date: 2026-03-29 09:32:00
