Kennedy Movie Review: A dying city, a haunting mood piece

Watching Kennedy, I realised that there is a difference between a filmmaker’s most iconic work and most definitive work. When it comes to Anurag Kashyap, films such as Gangs of Wasseypur, Dev D and Black Friday have deservingly achieved their place in the pantheon, albeit for different reasons. In such a prolific body of work, it is easy to ignore films like Ugly, Raman Raghav 2.0 and Gulaal. And yet, these are the films where Kashyap arguably channeled his distinctive side as a film artist, giving us stories where it was hard to find hope and darkness engulfed us all around. Kennedy, Anurag Kashyap’s haunting mood-piece, is a satisfying throwback to that phase of the filmmaker, where he revelled in the brooding nihilism of his anti-heroes, unafraid to chase the macabre shades of the urban landscape he loves to loathe.

Cast: Rahul Bhat, Sunny Leone, Aamir Aziz, Abhilash Thapliyal, Mohit Takalkar

Director: Anurag Kashyap

It’s about the night and its darkness. It’s about Mumbai's underbelly. Kennedy aka Uday Shetty (Rahul Bhat) is an ex-cop who works as a contract killer for Mumbai police while being officially dead for the world and his wife and daughter. This film is nothing if not a cold eulogy for a dying city, capturing not just a decaying soul but a rotten system that shelters and feeds off it at once. It is not afraid of looking inwards and examining where the violence comes from — that’s what lends it its cynicism. It’s hard to ignore the dystopian quality of it all — it only helps that Kennedy is set in the times of COVID, and that Kennedy’s voice resembles less to a mortal being and more to a humanoid. 

Kennedy remains an irredeemable protagonist — he is in exile, both physical and emotional, living in guilt — and Kashyap has the understanding to maintain a distance from his emotional turmoil, while capturing his obsessive pursuit of revenge. We see it all and feel it all, and yet remain at bay; we are far too mystified by the sense of doom the narrative carries with it. There is also something to be said about Rahul Bhat’s searing gaze that does the heavy lifting here. It’s a dead stare into everyone that surrounds him, intense and yet revealing nothing. In what’s the most visceral moment of the film, Kennedy confronts a version of himself after one of his assassinations. He knows what must be done to curb it right there — For once, we are not sure whether Kennedy's actions come from his innate drive for violence or are an attempt to redeem himself in some form. Either way, there is blood on the floor.

While Kennedy is a gripping narrative on its own, what elevates the experience is that the form and content land smoothly in Kashyap’s comfort zone. At the same time, there is a fascinating marriage of restlessness and calm in Kashyap’s filmmaking here — the former is quintessential of him, it’s the latter that surprises. The former reflects in the use of sociopolitical poetry pieces (performed by an excellently evocative Aamir Aziz). The latter reflects in how the filmmaker doesn’t go overboard with the styling (as he is prone to sometimes) or how he relies more on mood, less on set-pieces. He does not try to offset the hopelessness with sprinkles of humour, either, though some jokes do arrive via his attempt at political satire. For example, three men harass a passerby about not banging thalis, and there is a scene involving a hyper news reporter outside Kennedy’s old flat. The hints at satire stand out all the more because of how intimate the rest of the narrative is. You can hear Kashyap chuckle when terms like ‘Bade Papa’ and ‘Supremo’ are consistently mentioned here while talking about the corporate-political nexus. And of course, that hotel name, which sounds uncannily similar to those who must not be named. 

The poetry performances do get a bit too on-the-nose at times, underlining what we already know of Kennedy and undermining its own otherwise-understated energy. Charlie (a passable Sunny Leone) remains an under-explored character that deviates more than it intrigues. The film particularly falters when it builds up a narrative tension that never finds a satisfying release. Instead, Kashyap chooses to again go inwards — finally giving Kennedy an aching expression after 140 minutes of being a cold-blooded spectator to his hollow life. While underwhelming on one level, the film suddenly attains a layer of exorcism for the filmmaker who continues to be one of the most compelling chroniclers of male loneliness. While occasionally off-tune, Kennedy doesn’t miss a beat.