nitting Revisiting the striking Badlapur, Subhash K Jha takes a look back at the drama directed by Sridhar Raghavan’s which released 10 years ago on February 20th.

“The tree remembers, the axe forgets,” reads a proverb in the opening credits of a film that left me feeling like both the tree and the axe. While the film’s pain-lashed topography in the first overture is exceptional—with every vein on Varun Dhawan’s temples ringing a bell—the second overture gets audacious, tongue-in-cheek, subversive, and sometimes downright silly. As if the tree decided to get even with the axe by cutting off its own branches.

Cast in the mould of the greatest redemptive dramas Badlapur has an ambitious ambience of unmitigated doom irrigating almost every frame. It’s as if director Sriram Raghavan and his co-writer Arijit Biswas wants to shut out all light from his protagonist Raghavan’s life.