Dhurandhar: Cinema Stops Reflecting. Sells Violence

There was a time when cinema held up a mirror to society. It observed. It reflected. It made us uncomfortable enough to think.

Films like Dhurandhar do not just tell stories. They edit reality, distort it, and at times weaponize it. Violence in storytelling is not new. From Deewar to Satya, cinema has explored anger, crime, and rebellion. But those films carried weight. They left behind discomfort. They forced reflection.

Dhurandhar does something else.

It packages violence as spectacle and sells it as pride.

What are we really watching?

Throats being slit in the background. Bodies thrown into boiling oil. Men tied, dragged behind motorcycles, hung, and tortured with chilling precision. These are not fleeting images. They are prolonged and detailed, almost instructional.

We are no longer just watching violence.

We are absorbing it. We are rehearsing it.

And what we rehearse often enough, we begin to normalize.

This is not storytelling. This is demonstration of hate, of inhumanity, of killing in the name of nationalism. The convenient defense follows. It is fiction.

But fiction does not erase intent.

When narratives are repeatedly designed to dull sensitivity, distort history, and make cruelty appear justified, the impact is not imaginary. It is psychological.

Why I am saying this

Many critics have already reviewed Dhurandhar. They have discussed its performances, scale, and craft. That is not my concern.

My concern lies beyond cinema.

When violence becomes so stylized and acceptable that it no longer unsettles us, something deeper shifts. When hatred is framed as justification and cruelty as strength, we must ask whether we are still watching stories or slowly internalizing them.

Some may call it nationalism. Some may call it propaganda. Some may defend it as entertainment.

But as a viewer and as a human being, I cannot ignore the possibility that something in our moral fabric is being altered.

When Cinema Enters Society

This concern is not abstract.

I witnessed a real incident near my surroundings. A young man was brutally tortured by a group of boys in the name of cow protection. He begged for water for hours. Instead, he was humiliated further. He died.

He left behind a family. A wife, young children, and a paralysed father.

This was not just a crime. It was learned cruelty.

Where does such calculated brutality come from? What replaces empathy so completely? We grew up with ideas like Aham Brahmasmi, the belief that the divine exists in every being. What happens when those values fade?

More disturbing than the act itself was the silence around it.

People watched. No one intervened.

There were no weapons. No real threat. Only indifference.

Because somewhere, the act had already been justified.

Labels were ready. Muslim. Outsider. Enemy. Once a human being is reduced to a label, cruelty becomes easier. And once it becomes easier, it begins to feel justified.

A Thought That Should Disturb You

Imagine this.

You are in an unfamiliar place. A misunderstanding occurs. Someone labels you wrongly as the other.

What happens next?

This is not fear. This is possibility.

Humanity does not disappear overnight. It is edited out, scene by scene.

Narratives like Dhurandhar may be contributing to that process.

 

Violence as a Market

If brutality sells, it will be produced.

That is the new grammar of cinema.

We have seen traces of it before. It grew louder with films like Gangs of Wasseypur and Haider. It intensified with Animal. With Dhurandhar, it feels systematized.

I could not watch Animal fully. Even Dhurandhar required pauses.

Because this is not just entertainment.

Drugs damage the body. This kind of cinema engineers the mind.

It normalizes dehumanization, something history has shown us before.

Nationalism, Rewritten

Earlier films like Border built nationalism on sacrifice and collective courage.

But Dhurandhar rewrites that idea.

Here, violence becomes duty. Criminality becomes patriotism. Nationalism is no longer rooted in one’s own land. It is performed in the enemy’s territory, through a world of arms dealers, drugs, and lawlessness.

Such portrayals do not exist in isolation.

If other nations adopt the same logic and depict India through distortion under the label of fiction, the cycle will repeat. Hatred will not remain one-sided. It will multiply.

This is not accidental. This is design.

Last Word

Dhurandhar is not just a film.

It is a signal.

A signal of what we are willing to watch.
A signal of what we are willing to accept.

And perhaps of what we are becoming.

Because the most dangerous change is not what shocks us.

It is what stops shocking us.

And that is what should disturb us the most.

 Deba Ranjan

Email: debasar11@yahoo.co.in