Prahaar Review: Avinash Arun's 26/11 Courtroom Drama

The film opens in the aftermath of the attacks, with the city still bleeding and the legal apparatus scrambling to make sense of a crime that seemed designed to defy comprehension. Nikam (Rajkummar Rao) is brought in to prosecute Kasab (Lalit Prabhakar), the lone surviving gunman, and what follows is less a trial of one man than an examination of how a democracy handles the unthinkable. The script, written with a journalist's eye for procedure, moves between the courtroom, the investigation, and the quieter chambers of Nikam's home, where the case bleeds into his marriage and his sleep. Wamiqa Gabbi appears as a legal colleague whose idealism gradually hardens into pragmatism; Jaideep Ahlawat and Sikandar Kher offer solid support in roles that could have been thankless in lesser hands. The narrative resists the temptation to turn Kasab into a monster or a martyr. He is a cog, and the film is more interested in the machine.

What strikes you first is the sound design. Arun, who has a background in cinematography, understands that a courtroom is a theatre of small noises - the shuffle of papers, the click of a pen, the pause before a witness answers. There is no swelling score to tell you when to feel. You have to lean in. That restraint extends to the performances. Rajkummar Rao plays Nikam not as a firebrand but as a man who has learned to compartmentalize, whose fury is channeled into footnotes and cross-examinations. His best scenes are not the big speeches but the ones where he is alone, reading, and you can see the case calcifying in his posture.

Lalit Prabhakar's Kasab is a study in blankness. He doesn't give you a villain to hate; he gives you a boy who has been hollowed out, and the horror is in how unremarkable he seems. The film's smartest choice is to deny him a psychology. He is not the story. The story is the system that has to hold him accountable without becoming him.

Where the film stumbles is in its ambition. At 140 minutes, it wants to be both an intimate character study and a sweeping legal epic, and the seams show. Some subplots - particularly a thread involving a defense lawyer played by Ashish Vidyarthi - feel underwritten, as if the film is nervous about giving the other side too much room. The result is a slightly lopsided narrative that occasionally loses momentum in the middle stretch. But the final act, which hinges on a piece of evidence you don't see coming, lands with a quiet, devastating precision.

Pros:

• Rajkummar Rao's performance is a masterclass in restraint, anchoring every scene.
• The film respects procedural detail without drowning in jargon.
• Lalit Prabhakar's Kasab is chilling precisely because he is so ordinary.
• Arun's direction and the film's sound design create an atmosphere of low-grade dread.

Cons:

• The 140-minute runtime occasionally sags in the second act.
• Some supporting characters, especially the defense side, feel underdeveloped.
• The film's reluctance to dramatize certain moments can feel like a missed opportunity.

Prahaar is not a crowd-pleaser. It is a film that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort, to follow a legal argument without a score telling them how to feel. It is, in that sense, a throwback to the serious Hindi courtroom dramas of the seventies and eighties, but with a modern understanding of how violence lingers in a room long after it has ended. Rajkummar Rao's Nikam is a man who does his job because someone has to, and the film's quiet triumph is that it makes that seem heroic without ever calling it that. Go for the performances. Stay for the silence. It stays with you longer than the noise.