Andhadhun Review

The germ was a French short film, L'Accordeur, and the working title was Shoot the Piano Player. Akash, played by Ayushmann Khurrana, fakes blindness as an artistic exercise, and it works too well: a retired film star hires him to play at his wedding anniversary, and Akash walks into the flat to find a corpse on the floor and the star's wife, Simi, cleaning up with her lover. He cannot stop playing, and he cannot admit he sees anything.

Sriram Raghavan stages that scene around a four minute piano piece with no close-ups, the camera restricted to what Akash can see, and it is one of the best set pieces in recent Hindi cinema. Tabu's Simi, improvising her way out of each new mess with terrifying calm, runs away with the film, and Khurrana, who learned to play for real, keeps pace with her. The dialogue is dry and mean, and Raghavan has cited Fargo as the inspiration for a world that is realistic and bizarre at once.

The second half sprawls into an organ trafficking subplot and one coincidence too many. The ending is deliberately open, and the film won National Awards for best Hindi film, best actor and best screenplay.