Daayra review: Kareena, Prithviraj's justice tale talks sharp, cuts shallow

Daayra movie review: Two people, two ideas of justice, one system that failed a young woman. Meghna Gulzar's Daayra, starring Kareena Kapoor and Prithviraj, has all the right ingredients — it just doesn't push them far enough.

In Short

• The story examines how police apathy failed Ragini before her death
• Ajooni's inquiry retraces missing hours, paperwork delays and ignored pleas
• Kareena Kapoor Khan plays the internal vigilance officer with measured restraint

There is a line in Daayra that lands like a quiet punch. DCP Ajooni Kohli, speaking to her subordinate Vishal about a system that has failed a young woman, says, “System change hote hain Vishal, log nahi. Attitude kaise change karoge?” It is the kind of line that stays with you. And it captures, in one breath, exactly what Meghna Gulzar’s film is trying to do — hold a mirror to a system where the instinctive response to a girl not returning home is still, somewhere deep in the collective mindset, that the fault must lie with the girl.

Daayra has real things to say. The question is whether it says them with enough force.

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 2019 Hyberabad gang rape and murder.

Daayra is not really about the encounter. It is about everything that came before it. A missing complaint that was never properly filed. A family asked to come back later, fill another form, go to a different police station. CCTV footage conveniently has a gap. By the time Ragini's body is found the next morning, the system had already failed her many times over.

That is where the film is at its sharpest. When Ajooni retraces those hours, the family's desperate visits to different police stations, the shrugs, the paperwork, the casual indifference, it is genuinely difficult to watch. And the film earns the anger it is asking you to feel.

Kareena Kapoor is solid as Ajooni – composed, precise and someone who does not waste time or words. The scene where she visits Ragini's family and listens to what those missing hours looked like is one of her quieter and better moments in the film. She is not playing a hero. She is playing a woman doing her job in a system she believes in, surrounded by evidence that the system does not always deserve that belief.

There is a potentially fascinating layer to Ajooni's character that the film introduces but never fully explores. Her father, played by Kanwaljit, a retired judge, was shot on court premises. Her faith in the judiciary is therefore not just in theory, it is personal and complicated. Does her father's fate make her commitment to due process stronger, or does it make her secretly furious at the very system she defends? Does she ever fear becoming like Raman? The film never really answers these questions and quickly moves on, and that is its most significant missed opportunity. Five more minutes given to that father-daughter relationship could have made Ajooni genuinely complex rather than simply principled.

Prithviraj Sukumaran is convincing as Raman Kumar, a man whose position is clear from the start and who does not pretend otherwise. He believes the system failed Ragini. He believes it will fail the next girl too. The film does not ask you to agree with him. It does ask you to understand him, and Prithviraj makes that possible without making Raman sympathetic in a way that lets him off the hook.

The more effectively Daayra makes you angry at what happened to Ragini, the easier it becomes to understand, emotionally, that why a man like Raman would do what he did. That is exactly the contradiction a film like this should be exploiting. Daayra knows it is there. It just doesn't do enough with it.

Daayra positions itself as a commentary rather than a thriller, and that is a choice the filmmaker has made. It is not interested in telling you who is right. It lays out both positions and steps back. The statistics that close the film — rape reported every 20 minutes, encounter reported every day, and only 23 per cent of rape accused convicted — make the argument clear.

But here is the problem. The film sets Ajooni and Raman up as ideological opposites from the very beginning. Their eventual confrontation at the airport, when she ambushes him on his return, should be the moment the film has been building towards. Their philosophies collide. Their personal histories matter. The audience is forced to genuinely reckon with both positions. Instead, the confrontation is subdued. Polite, almost — and it lacks the impact it needed.

For a film that has spent two hours carefully constructing this collision, the moment of impact barely registers. The cat-and-mouse tension that the investigation promises never quite materialises, and by the time the final confrontation arrives, the film has already told you where everyone stands. There is no surprise, no real test of either character's convictions, no moment where the ground shifts.

Jitendra Joshi, always reliable, does good work in a supporting role. Biswapati Sarkar, as Raman's senior, is used sparingly but effectively. Kanwaljit Singh as Ajooni's father is present in a few scenes but, as with the character itself, the material does not give him enough to work with. Kshitee Jog as Ragini's mother is brilliant. You can feel her pain.

Daayra is a film with the right instincts and genuine conviction behind it. Meghna Gulzar is asking important questions about justice, the judiciary and what happens to women who fall between the cracks of a system that was supposed to protect them. The procedural sections work well. Kareena and Prithviraj are both good. The film's anger at institutional failure is real.

But it holds back where it should push forward. The personal stakes of its central character are underdeveloped. The final confrontation doesn't land the way it should. And if you want your audience to wrestle with a difficult moral question, you have to make them genuinely uncomfortable first. But, Daayra doesn't quite get there.

The film is worth a watch, but may leave you wanting more from it than it is willing to give.

- Ends