Darkness Redux: Anurag Kashyap is back on the neo-noir trail with Kennedy
After venturing into the fray with mainstream themes for over half a decade, Anurag Kashyap’s new release, Kennedy, marks his return to the neo-noir genre.
Tell me, how many murders have you committed? Tell me, how much fun did you have…for how many coins did you sell the dead bodies? Tell me, how much did you earn?
(Tell me, how many lives did you take? Tell me, did you enjoy it… What price did you get for the dead bodies? Tell me, how much did you earn?)
Anurag Kashyap’s lead protagonist, Rahul Bhatt as Kennedy, enters his ordinary Mumbai home like any normal person after a day’s job, these words playing in the background. Except that Kennedy is no ordinary guy with a day job. As the lines reveal, he is actually a contract killer who used to be a policeman, when he was known as Uday Shetty.
Kennedy isn’t for everyone
Kashyap has been waiting for a long time Kennedywhich finally dropped on streaming for public viewing in India this weekend, marks the prolific filmmaker’s return to neo-noir after exploring more mainstream subjects for nearly half a decade.
Kennedy it’s a moody movie. It’s not for everyone, you realize, a slow-paced story as the film’s protagonist tries to dissect a dystopian world devoid of hope. The plot unfolds in the Covid years, with Uday working as a cabbie. The obligatory mask hides half of his face – as well as most other characters – completely. The mask literally becomes a symbol of Kennedy’s world – the people in his workplace do not fully reveal emotions or intentions.
Kashyap has tried to create Kennedy Different from previous efforts such as the neo-noir genre no smoking, ugly, Bombay Velvet And Raman Raghav 2.0. His new film is much more introspective, almost bordering on nihilism, as it explores the mind of a killer who struggles not to lose his sanity.
Yet there is something tragic poetic in the turmoil of the rise. His free fall – from a policeman who was once in control, to one ruined after a personal loss (clichéd, true) – is best described in William Wordsworth’s lines that appear at the beginning of the film’s credits:
We poets begin with joy in our youth;
but it comes in the end,
despair and madness.
Kashyap wastes no time in defining the mindset of Uday Shetty. “I have killed so many people, I don’t even remember them (I have killed so many people that I have lost count),” is an opening monologue.
In many ways, the reveal of The Rise is reminiscent of Michael Fassbender’s The Killer in the 2023 David Fincher film, bloody. Although there are differences in plot and characterization, the neo-noir tone established by Kashyap Kennedy There is a similarity. Of course, you could say that these kind of thematic sentiments aren’t limited to Fincher’s film. Cinematic genre killers inhabit much the same bleak world.
Neo-Noir, Vintage Kashyap
A look at some of Anurag Kashyap’s earlier experiments with neo-noir shows that he has had a tendency to use the genre for different types of storytelling. In his 2007 historical film, no smokingNeo-noir becomes a tool for creating surrealism. One of Kashyap’s darkest and most accomplished works, the John Abraham-starrer about a man addicted to smoking is filled with heavy Kafkaesque observations.
Kashyap wowed the world with his 2014 film, uglywould seem less experimental than no smoking, But this is infinitely more cynical. Although the premise of a young girl’s disappearance is conventional, ugly Uses neo-noir storytelling to deviate from the usual kidnapping story and lead to a horrifying ending that leaves the audience with a feeling of despair.
Kashyap will revisit the neo-noir genre Bombay Velvet Next year itself. Starring Ranbir Kapoor and Anushka Sharma, and being heavily promoted with an estimated budget of over Rs 110 crore, the retro-noir crime drama has been the filmmaker’s most ambitious project to date commercially. However, the mix of stylish noir and generic gangster drama was not enough to cover a script that was entirely suitable for neither mainstream fans nor offbeat junkies. Despite its charming premise about a metropolis undergoing a metamorphosis in the form of Mumbai of the sixties, Bombay Velvet crashed.
till Kashyap was released Raman Raghav 2.0 (known as Psycho Raman In some markets) In 2016, he became a master of the neo-noir game: keep it within the budget and serve it up with shock factor. Reminiscent of European noir classics, the film is based on real-life murderer Raman Raghav of 1960s Mumbai. Kashyap uses elements of noir to establish a world full of moral ambiguity in this cat-and-mouse tale of a serial killer (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) and a corrupt policeman (Vicky Kaushal), where law and order are entangled.
mainstream with a twist
KennedyA slow-paced crime drama with thriller elements, returns after more than half a decade Raman Raghav 2.0. Anurag Kashyap spent years toying with ideas that were more mainstream – at least ideologically.
it was a boxing drama boxer and love triangle as per your wish In 2018. Bizarre suspense drama Choked (2021) followed by a science-fiction thriller again More teenybopper musical romances in 2022 almost love with dj mohabbat Next year. sniper was released in 2025However it was later completed Kennedy.
With Anurag Kashyap, of course, there’s always a twist to the story – each of his mainstream endeavors has also been about trying to add a generic spin. But that’s another story.
