September 11, 2026 - there is a particular kind of silence that fills a cinema hall when a filmmaker decides to trust his audience. Priyadarshan, the man Bollywood has long associated with crisp comedies and grand ensemble dramas, appears to be chasing that silence with Haiwaan, a crime thriller that lands in theatres today carrying a runtime of 164 minutes and a premise that refuses to sit comfortably.
The story, as the makers have laid it out, follows a retired judge whose life becomes a slow-burning nightmare. He has put a convict behind bars, and that decision will not stay in the past. The judge struggles to keep his daughter safe from the man he once sentenced - a setup that sounds like familiar revenge territory until the film takes a harder turn. The judge is murdered. What remains is his daughter, alone and hunted, and an unlikely protector: a man with visual impairment who had been fiercely loyal to her father.
That guardian is Parshuram, played by Akshay Kumar. It is the kind of role that could have been written as a gimmick - a blind man as an action figure - but the film's own description suggests something more interesting. His loyalty is not a superpower. It is a debt, an emotional inheritance from a man who is no longer alive to collect on it. Kumar, an actor who has spent three decades oscillating between slapstick and patriotic drama, now finds himself in the sort of stripped-down, morally complicated space that has occasionally brought out his best work.
Opposite him, Saif Ali Khan steps into the role of Shyam. Khan has an undeniable appetite for menace - he has played villains with a relish that few of his contemporaries can match - and the convict at the centre of this story gives him room to be both charming and terrifying, sometimes in the same scene. The film's tension, one suspects, will rest on the collision of these two men: one who cannot see, and one who believes he has nothing left to lose.
Around them sits a cast that reads like a character actor's dream. Boman Irani, Rajpal Yadav, Rajesh Sharma and Sharib Hashmi - as Sanjay Shinde - bring the kind of lived-in texture that Hindi crime dramas often lean on to sell their world. Shriya Pilgaonkar and Saiyami Kher, the latter playing Inspector Varsha Joshi, round out a roster that suggests Haiwaan is less interested in solo heroics than in the messy web of people a single crime pulls into its orbit.
At 164 minutes, the film is not in a hurry. That runtime is a statement of intent, and it will be the first thing audiences argue about on the way out. Crime thrillers in Bollywood have increasingly drifted toward tighter, faster cuts, but Priyadarshan is an old-school craftsman - a director who began in Malayalam cinema and built a reputation on pacing his stories like a slow build rather than a sprint. Whether that patience serves the material or tests it is the central question of the weekend.
The genres listed are crime and thriller, and the filmmakers have not pretended otherwise. This is not a film that promises relief. The premise alone - a murdered father, a daughter in danger, a blind avenger - suggests a story where the stakes are personal and the violence is likely to feel earned rather than spectacular. The visual impairment of the protagonist is especially intriguing because it forces the film to solve problems of staging and suspense rather than simply escalating them. A man who cannot see must rely on sound, memory, touch, and the loyalty others once showed him.
It is also, notably, a Hindi-language Bollywood production, and the industry's recent appetite for darker, star-driven thrillers has clearly shaped what got made here. Kumar and Khan sharing a frame is the commercial hook, but the film's real currency may be its willingness to place a vulnerable protagonist at the centre of a revenge narrative and ask what protection actually costs.
Haiwaan releases today, and with a TMDb rating still sitting at zero - no audience scores have accumulated yet - everything about its reception remains unwritten. What is clear is that Priyadarshan has stepped outside his comfort zone, and he has brought two of the industry's most experienced leading men with him. Whether that gamble pays off will be decided by the audiences walking into theatres this weekend, and by whether they are willing to sit with a long, uneasy story about a man who cannot see the danger coming - and refuses to let it win anyway.
