Sriram Raghavan
If there ever is a resurgence of the film noir movement in Hindi cinema, one can safely attribute it to Sriram Raghavan’s dark cinema. In the cleverly constructed Andhadhun, a blind pianist (Ayushmann Khurrana) ‘witnesses’ a murder of a yesteryear, nostalgic-songs-prone movie star (Anil Dhawan in an inspired piece of casting). In a chilling sequence, Ayushmann goes to report the murder at a police station but does a volte face and reports the murder of his cat when the murderer stands in front of him in an inspector’s uniform. The film establishes a nail-biting sequence laced with bitter black humour, which is Raghavan’s forte. The director also extracts scalpel-sharp performances from Khurrana, and especially from Tabu as the noir-ish femme fatale and Dhawan’s duplicitous spouse with a ‘Lady Macbeth’ air around her.
