Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai

Apoorv Singh Karki's 2023 legal drama is inspired by the five-year fight of P. C. Solanki, a sessions court lawyer from Jodhpur. The case is real: the 2013 allegation that a sixteen-year-old girl was raped by the self-styled godman Asaram, and the trial that ended in a life sentence in 2018. Manoj Bajpayee plays the lawyer as unshowy, quiet-spoken, trusting nothing but the file, and the film's strength lies exactly in that restraint. Almost everything takes place in the courtroom and in preparation meetings; the threats, the vanishing witnesses and the pressure are shown without being inflated by dramatic scoring. The one weakness is that the victim is largely kept at the edge of the story: building the fight around the lawyer's heroism leaves the person whose story it is in the background. Who it's for: viewers who follow legal dramas drawn from real cases and Manoj Bajpayee's acting. Who it's not for: anyone who will struggle with a narrative centred on the sexual assault of a minor, or who expects to hear the victim's own voice.