A Scathing Indictment of a Society Where Justice Arrives Too Late. Arnab Banerjee reviews Assi, Anubhav Sinha’s searing drama on sexual violence and systemic failure, examining justice, complicity, and survival in contemporary India through powerful performances by Taapsee Pannu and Kani Kusruti.

Director: Anubhav Sinha

Cast: Taapsee Pannu, Kani Kusruti, Mohd. Zeeshan Ayyub, Manoj Pahwa, Seema Pahwa, Naseeruddin Shah, Revathy, and Supriya Pathak Kapur

Cinematography: Ewan Mulligan

Duration: 133 minutes

Rating: ★★★☆☆

A nation that measures sexual violence in minutes rather than in isolated tragedies has already indicted itself. In India, a rape is reported, on average, every twenty minutes—a statistic so numbing in its repetition that it risks becoming background noise. More damning still is the chronic failure of justice: cases stall, survivors are scrutinized more ruthlessly than perpetrators, and institutions meant to shield the vulnerable too often retreat into silence or self-preservation.

It is into this moral quicksand that Anubhav Sinha strides with Assi, a film that refuses both euphemism and escape.

The title gestures toward a grim arithmetic—the relentless tally of violation—and the film wastes no time in translating statistic into flesh. Parima (Kani Kusruti), a schoolteacher returning home from a colleague’s farewell, is abducted, brutalized, and discarded by a group of men who treat her body as sport and spoil. One moment she is an ordinary woman in an ordinary city; the next, she is trapped in a moving prison of jeering masculinity.

At home, her husband Vinay (Mohd. Zeeshan Ayyub) and their young son count the passing hours, unaware that the life they knew has already been shattered.

The Violence and Its Aftermath

The assault sequence is staged with punishing immediacy. Time dilates grotesquely. The men’s laughter curdles the air; their grotesque “brotherhood” transforms violence into competition. It is difficult to watch—intentionally so. Sinha denies the audience the comfort of quick cuts or aesthetic distance. The camera lingers, insisting that we inhabit the suffocation, the terror, the degradation. If it feels unending, that is precisely the point: for the survivor, it is.

Yet Assi is not content to chronicle brutality; it interrogates the aftermath. Kani Kusruti renders Parima with extraordinary restraint. Her bruises fade; her soul does not. She is neither reduced to victimhood nor inflated into sanctity. She is a woman negotiating the unbearable—returning to a body that no longer feels like home, to a society that regards her with a blend of pity and discomfort. Her husband, portrayed with aching steadiness by Mohd. Zeeshan Ayyub, grapples with his own helplessness, the masculine instinct to fix colliding with the stark reality that some wounds defy repair.

Complicity in Corridors and Classrooms

The film’s most incisive observations lie in its depiction of complicity. When Parima seeks to resume teaching, her principal—briefly embodied by Seema Pahwa—suggests she is not ready, nor are the students. In whispered corridors and encrypted chat groups, teenage boys circulate lewd commentary, proving that rape culture is not born in dark alleys alone but cultivated in classrooms, living rooms, and digital echo chambers. The crime reverberates outward, exposing the soft underbelly of a society that normalizes misogyny in the name of banter.

Grief overlaps with grief. A colleague’s death in a hit-and-run, voiced by Divya Dutta, introduces another register of loss, while her husband—played by Kumud Mishra—embodies a more ambiguous moral frailty. These parallel narratives thicken the film’s inquiry into accountability: who stands up, who steps aside, and who quietly absolves themselves?

The Courtroom as Battleground

At the heart of the legal battle stands Raavi (Taapsee Pannu), the lawyer who chooses to confront the system rather than navigate around it. She believes in due process even when it disappoints her, yet she understands that justice rarely yields to polite insistence. The courtroom sequences crackle with urgency. Arguments land not as rhetoric but as indictment. The film’s 133-minute runtime hurtles forward with near-breathless intensity, mirroring the reality that in cases like these, delay is its own cruelty.

Sinha’s direction is unapologetically confrontational. He trains his lens not only on the perpetrators but on the institutions that equivocate, on the bystanders who avert their gaze, on the cultural codes that enable impunity. The film occasionally risks didacticism, and some supporting characters—among them a brief appearance by Naseeruddin Shah—feel more symbolic than fully realized. Yet these are minor fissures in an otherwise searing edifice. As the cop stuck between a corrupt system and his conscience, Jatin Goswami leaves a mark as Sinha and co-writer Gaurav Solanki explore the stigma faced by survivors, the many meanings of justice, and a generally selfish, benumbed society.

A Mirror to an Unsettled Nation

Assi does not flatter its audience with easy catharsis. It offers no triumphant swell of violins to soothe the conscience. Instead, it confronts us with a question both simple and devastating: what does justice mean in a society where violence is routine and outrage fleeting? The film insists that the true obscenity is not only the act of rape but the ecosystem that permits it—every snigger, every silence, every procedural delay.

In transforming a statistic into a story, Sinha compels us to reckon with the human cost behind the numbers. And in doing so, Assi becomes more than cinema. It becomes a mirror—unyielding, uncomfortable, and impossible to ignore. 

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