Arnab Banerjee reviews Meghna Gulzar's Daayra, a morally ambitious crime drama where Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran confront justice, vengeance, and the uneasy boundaries separating lawful duty from conviction.

Daayra: Flawed Virtue, Unvarnished Truth, Calculated Conviction

Director and Writer: Meghna Gulzar

Co-writers: Sima Agarwal, Yash Keswani

Starring: Kareena Kapoor Khan, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Kanwaljeet Singh, Anuja Sathe, Jitendra Joshi

Cinematography: Saurabh Goswami

Editing: Charu Shree Roy, Meghna Gulzar

Music: Amit Trivedi (song), Ketan Sodha (score)

Rating: ★★½

Do the ends ever truly justify the means? Can justice be meted out by those sworn merely to enforce the law? When two starkly contrasting police officers are drawn into the investigation of a young girl's brutal disappearance and murder, these questions—among several others—confront the edifice of law with unsettlingly plausible answers.

Meghna Gulzar's latest offering, Daayra, starring Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran as the two investigating officers, reopens an age-old debate: the tension between law and morality, between justice and vengeance. The narrative unfolds against a harrowing crime scene, framed by a mother's desperate plea for justice.

Two Officers, Two Moral Codes

The film's two protagonists embody opposed philosophies of policing. DCP Ajooni Kohli (Kareena Kapoor Khan) operates rigidly within the boundaries of the law, while DCP Raman Kumar (Prithviraj Sukumaran) works beyond them, unconstrained by their limits. Immersed in their respective convictions as custodians of justice, the two officers offer the viewer a window into both the legal machinery and the criminal underworld of the nation.

Rather than being drawn from a single case, the film draws upon a composite of real-life crimes and encounter killings across India—though echoes of the 2012 Nirbhaya case surface at several points. In doing so, Daayra ventures into the moral grey zone between instant justice, embodied by police encounters, and the deliberate, often delayed course of legal justice—ultimately interrogating whether the ends can ever justify the means.

A Crime That Unravels Backwards

The film opens with DCP Raman Kumar, played by Prithviraj Sukumaran, being celebrated. His team has shot down four men accused of brutalising and burning 24-year-old Ragini Poojari and leaving her remains near a Delhi highway. The public is cheering. There is also a question mark—were these encounters real, or were they fake?

Into this steps Ajooni Kohli (Kareena Kapoor Khan), from Internal Vigilance, who is handed the investigation into the encounter. She arrives in Suryapur with her team, starts working backwards through the timeline, and the film begins to unpack what actually happened—to Ragini, to the four accused, and to the police officers in between.

The case seems to be inspired by the 2019 Hyderabad gang rape and murder. Written (co-written by Yash Keswani and Sima Agarwal) and directed by Meghna Gulzar, the story revolves around Ajooni (Kareena Kapoor Khan), who heads an SIT investigating a police encounter. It involves multiple men accused of gang-raping a young girl and then burning her to death. The encounter was carried out by DCP Raman Kumar (Prithviraj Sukumaran) and his team, who claim they all tried to flee during custody. What Ajooni uncovers during the investigation forms the crux of the story.

An Ambitious Structure, Uneven Execution

Daayra presents a provocative conceptual landscape, constructing an illusion of moral complexity that challenges viewers who typically favour neat, conventional storytelling. The film’s dynamic hinges on two towering protagonists whose opposing ethical frameworks clash from afar, converging only in the final act. It exposes a chilling paradox: the figure revered by society as the victor is actually an agent of institutional decay, betraying the duty to serve as a mediator for justice and instead reducing the rule of law to a hollow travesty.

Edited by Charu Shree Roy and Meghna Gulzar, the 146-minute film eschews a conventional, linear narrative in favour of a complex structural design. Gulzar deploys a series of labyrinthine flashbacks that systematically immerse the viewer in the sinister reality of the crime and its surrounding webs of ambiguity. Consequently, audience members accustomed to straightforward storytelling may find the intricate editing—which alternates between rigorous legal granularities and fleeting, elliptical references—challenging to navigate.

Performances That Anchor The Conflict

Prithviraj delivers an impeccably calibrated performance as Raman, embodying a character who remains resolutely unswayed by moral turmoil once his course is set. A distinguished star across South Indian cinema, he has also left an indelible mark on Hindi film with memorable turns in projects such as Aiyyaa, Sarzameen, and 83. Consequently, his portrayal of a figure who allows a moral and legal transgression to slide—only to be lionized by the populace—feels supremely well judged.

Concurrently, Kareena Kapoor Khan appears intent on reinventing her artistic cadence, embracing a role stripped entirely of glamour and ostentatious ornament. While she acquits herself admirably, one senses the underlying effort as she adapts to a narrative framework that eschews the heightened, conventional melodrama in which she has traditionally excelled.