Raman Raghav 2.0

Anurag Kashyap's serial killer film, set in present-day Mumbai. Ramanna considers himself the continuation of Raman Raghav, who killed more than forty people in Mumbai in the 1960s. He takes his name from him, his method from him, and looks for a counterpart. The one he finds is a young policeman named Raghavan; Ramanna follows him, develops an obsession with him, and the difference between the two men becomes the film's central question. It is not a procedural and has no interest in who catches whom. The policeman uses drugs and commits violence too, and Kashyap deliberately narrows the distance between them. It was made cheaply and shot in twenty days, in the poorest parts of Mumbai. Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Ramanna and Vicky Kaushal plays Raghavan. It screened at Cannes in 2016, in the Directors' Fortnight. An important example for anyone interested in Indian independent cinema and the hard end of genre filmmaking. Before you watch, know this: the violence is explicit and uncomfortably made ordinary, and the film does that on purpose.