In Assi, Anubhav Sinha crafts not merely a courtroom drama but a grim, unflinching meditation on the anatomy of sexual violence and the systems that enable it. The title itself meaning “eighty” is a blunt statistical reminder: roughly 80 rapes are reported in India every single day. By anchoring his narrative to that chilling number, Sinha resists the temptation to present this as an isolated tragedy. Instead, he situates Parima’s ordeal within a continuum of violence, complicity and cultural rot.
The film opens with brutality and never quite lets the audience breathe easy. Parima (Kani Kusruti), a schoolteacher, is abducted and assaulted in a moving car late one night. One of the most horrific sequences and it is almost unbearable in its matter-of-fact cruelty, shows the perpetrators counting how many strokes they last, reducing the act to a grotesque contest. Sinha stages the scene without sensationalism. There is no manipulative background score, no aestheticised horror. The banality of the counting makes it far more disturbing. It is a stark reminder that evil often thrives not in melodrama but in casual entitlement.
Yet Assi does not exist to shock and awe. It does not revel in its own outrage. Instead, it widens its lens to interrogate the ecosystem around the crime. The courtroom becomes the crucible where these tensions simmer. Raavi (Taapsee Pannu), Parima’s lawyer, is fierce but not performative. Her closing argument, grounded in a painful realism, articulates the film’s central thesis: punishment alone does not eradicate the problem. What is needed is a generational shift in mindset, a hearts-and-minds approach that dismantles entitlement at its roots. Raavi has a line which says that it’s not that women don’t get angry. They don’t give into anger as they know it would result in the destruction of half the world. But this shouldn’t be counted as their weakness.
Sinha’s screenplay, co-written with Gaurav Solanki, is rigorous and layered. It draws unmistakable parallels with the 2017 abduction and assault of a prominent Malayalam actress in Kochi, a case that exposed the dark intersections of celebrity, power and legal obfuscation. The casting of Kusruti, herself a Malayalam actor, feels deliberate. And yet the film stops short of becoming a docudrama. It absorbs elements from reality but expands them into a broader commentary. Assi is not about one case; it is about a culture.
The writing excels in its quieter, insidious details. Consider the scene where Deepraj (Manoj Pahwa), father of the accused driver, shares roadside chole bhature with his son and suggests that if he wanted sex, he could have simply gone to a call girl. The remark lands with a thud. It is not shouted; it is offered as common sense. In that offhand normalisation lies the real horror. Toxic masculinity is not always aggressive; sometimes it is inherited over breakfast.
The strand involving Parima’s school underscores how violence seeps into everyday spaces. Remember the ‘boy’s locker room’ scandal where young boys were openly espousing rape in their social media chats? Here too, chats mocking their raped teacher circulate among students. One even laments not being invited to the “party”. When Parima breaks down in court, questioning how boys she has taught for a decade could think of her that way, the film captures a systemic failure. She saw them as children. They were absorbing cues from a culture that had already corrupted them.
The vigilante strand, a masked figure dubbed Chatri Man who murders two accused, complicates the moral landscape. Sinha resists the catharsis of revenge. Violence, the film insists, begets violence. Justifying vigilante killings could just as easily justify retaliatory atrocities. It is a sobering stance in an era hungry for instant justice.
Performance-wise, Assi is uniformly exceptional. Kani Kusruti delivers a portrayal of trauma that is deeply internalised. Her Parima is not a symbol but a person, disoriented, numb, sometimes frustratingly unable to recall details that the legal system demands. In scenes where DNA evidence fails, CCTV footage is corrupted and memory falters, Kusruti conveys the exhaustion of being disbelieved without resorting to theatrics. Her courtroom breakdown is devastating precisely because it feels unperformed.
Taapsee Pannu matches her with steely restraint. Raavi could easily have been written as a fiery, slogan-spouting advocate. Instead, Pannu underplays, allowing anger to simmer beneath composure. Her final speech does not seek applause; it seeks introspection. It is one of her most controlled, and layered performances to date.
The supporting cast is equally on point. Revathy lends Judge Vasudha an unshakeable authority, embodying the fragile hope that institutions can still function with integrity. Manoj Pahwa’s Deepraj is chilling in his civility. Kumud Mishra brings ambiguity to Kartik, wrestling with his own unspoken wounds. Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub is quietly moving as Parima’s husband Vinay, who refuses to let his young son be shielded from reality, insisting that confronting truth is the only way to prevent repetition. Seema Pahwa shines as the compassionate principal, while special appearances by Naseeruddin Shah and Supriya Pathak add gravitas without distracting from the core narrative.
Technically, the film is immaculate. Cinematographer Ewan Mulligan adopts a restrained visual palette, muted tones, unvarnished interiors, and the claustrophobia of court corridors. The camera often lingers, refusing to cut away from discomfort. There is no glossy sheen to soften the blows. Amarjeet Singh’s editing maintains a taut rhythm, balancing courtroom exchanges with glimpses of the world outside, news cycles, neighbourhood whispers, systemic apathy. The pacing never slackens, yet it allows moments of silence to resonate.
Assi is, ultimately, a film about complicity, familial, institutional and societal. It acknowledges police overwork and corruption without caricature. It portrays a legal system riddled with loopholes yet still capable of harbouring individuals of conscience. Most importantly, it refuses to reduce its survivor to a headline. Parima’s fight is not framed as a heroic spectacle but as a weary necessity.
Grounded, serious and unsparing, Assi transforms one woman’s trauma into a collective reckoning. It demands that we examine not only the crime but the culture that incubates it. In doing so, it becomes more than a courtroom drama. It becomes a mirror and an uncomfortable one at that. The film is releasing on February 20.
Also Read: Anubhav Sinha on Why He Titled His Film ASSI
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