When watching an Anurag Kashyap film, you know you’ve signed up for a gory, criminal and sinful world. With his latest directorial venture, however, you are not prepared for the gruesome details and shocking twists in the narrative. Ugly, one of Kashyap’s best films till date, is the only other movie that shocks with the stomach-churning cruelty of life.
Raman Raghav 2.0 betters that. The film is not about how life treats human beings – it is pure Satan in the form of humans – our protagonists take sadistic pleasure out of hurting others brutally.
Based on the infamous serial killer Psycho Raman from the 1960s Mumbai, Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0 traces the life of a fictional psychotic killer Ramanna(Nawazuddin Siddiqui) who is inspired by Raghav. He calls himself Sindhi Dalwai and finds a partner in Raghavan(Vicky Kaushal), a druggie cop who is more of a devil than he knows. Through eight chapters(Quentin Tarantino style) – Locked Man, The Sister, The Policeman, The Hunter, The Hunted, The Son, The Fallen and Soulmates – Kashyap builds his characters to a tall dark shadow that scares us out of our wits.