In Kennedy, Anurag Kashyap returns to the existential interior, creating his most personal film since Ugly

It is no wonder the film opens with a quote, borrowed, from William Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence: “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” It is a reflection, in some strange, inevitable way, of Kashyap’s own journey. In his youth, he began with gladness, with fire, with works that shook the air: Black Friday, Dev.D, Gangs of Wasseypur. Yet over time, those very works have become a source of despondency. The burden of their legacy outweighs the joy they once gave. He is repeatedly measured against them, asked to summon again the same frenzy, the same high. In much the same way, Kennedy (Rahul Bhatt), a man shaped by his own past, finds himself a ghost on a manhunt, moving through a world where the living are no less monstrous than the shadows he pursues.

In some ways, Kennedy can be read as a companion piece to Ugly.

It is captured in the film’s most harrowing moment: Kennedy sets out to kill an upright veteran activist, and instead, in a single, ruthless sweep, annihilates the man’s entire family. He turns next to a group of men eating by the roadside, and unleashes the same indiscriminate violence. What sears itself into memory is not only a man propelled by blind vengeance, unsure where it begins or ends, but a contagion of bloodlust so potent that it leaps from him to the activist’s own son, who, swept up in the frenzy, joins Kennedy in the murder of his father. It’s here, Kashyap lays bare a world reduced to zeros and ones; a world driven by futile rage, marked by pointless violence. And through this moment, he confronts the aftermath of his own creation, his protagonist, a man dictated entirely by his fury, deserving of no mercy, not even from himself.

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In that sense, it recalls Sriram Raghavan’s Badlapur, where the hunter becomes the hunted. Kennedy, like him, moves blindly through his quest, hunting a man who is less a target than a mirror, as he is, in truth, very much chasing closure he cannot yet name. It is an intriguing study of character: even the supposed antagonist recognizes the hero’s blind spots, calling out the violence he cannot see in himself. And yet, Kennedy, who thinks of himself as a mechanism for instant justice (at one point declares that a criminal should be shown no mercy), cannot extend the same justice to his own fractured soul. So just like the film, his rage can be read in many ways, among them, as an allegory for a society driven by instinctive violence, a hint towards the mob teeming with fury yet oblivious to its own destructiveness.

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However, the film that Kennedy most closely resembles is, in fact, a companion piece is Kashyap’s own 2013 feature Ugly, which also placed Bhatt at its center. There, as here, he constructs a genre piece only to expose the fractured moralities of the world. There, as here, the story revolves around an absentee father and a lost daughter. There, as here, the central narrative is very much the macguffin. In Ugly, the search for the missing daughter reveals the absence of humanity. In Kennedy, the hunt for a man reveals the ruin within the hunter. Time ticks forward within the film, moving inexorably towards “The Night,” yet by the time the moment arrives, you understand that there will be no dawn from hereon. Even as the film opens with a Wordsworth quote, it feels closer to Beckett: in its reckoning, in its surreal flourishes, in its endless relentless waiting. And yet, it circles always back to the personal: a father’s phone rings again and again, and a daughter waits at the other end, hoping, praying, that someone will answer.