Kartavya Review: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ☆☆ (3/5)
Kartavya is a serious and grounded crime thriller elevated by Saif Ali Khan’s committed performance and relevant social themes. While the film starts strong and carries moments of intensity, predictable writing and uneven emotional depth prevent it from becoming a truly gripping experience.
Director: Pulkit | Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Sanjay Mishra, Rasika Dugal, Yudhvir Ahlawat, Saurabh Dwivedi
Ever since Saif Ali Khan played Sartaj Singh in Sacred Games, there’s been a persistent hope that he’d find another role in that register — morally burdened, physically weathered, working in a world where the right thing and the possible thing are rarely the same. Kartavya is the closest he’s come to that territory since, and for stretches of the film, the hope feels justified.
Then the screenplay reminds you it’s not quite Sacred Games, and the film settles back into being a solid, well-intentioned crime thriller that doesn’t quite trust itself enough to be the thing it’s clearly trying to be. Kartavya stars Saif Ali Khan as a cop with seven days to solve a political assassination while navigating caste violence and khap politics. Strong performances, relevant themes, uneven execution. Full review here.
The setup is genuinely compelling. Pawan, a police officer played by Saif Ali Khan, is assigned to protect a journalist who gets assassinated directly in front of him. He’s suspended, humiliated, and given an informal ultimatum: seven days to find the killers or face the consequences of having failed publicly.
Running parallel to this investigation is a second storyline involving a young couple who elope against the wishes of their community, setting off a chain of events involving khap panchayat pressure, honour killing, and the specific kind of caste violence that the Indian hinterland produces when social authority feels threatened.
On paper, this is a powerful premise. The ticking clock gives the investigation urgency. The honour killing storyline gives the film its moral weight. The political corruption connecting both threads gives it relevance. The first act pulls all of this into focus quickly and creates genuine investment.
And then, somewhere in the second act, the grip loosens.
The atmosphere is consistent throughout and deserves credit. The cinematography captures the dusty tension of a rural political landscape — this isn’t a sanitized version of small-town India, it’s a specific and uncomfortable one. The visual tone matches the thematic content, which isn’t always the case in films that tackle social issues through genre mechanics.
Saif Ali Khan’s performance is the film’s clearest strength. He plays Pawan with a restraint that accumulates weight as the film progresses — this is a man who has been worn down by a system that works against him and has developed specific ways of carrying that exhaustion. The scenes where he’s working against bureaucratic obstruction, political interference, and his own limited resources feel authentic because Saif isn’t performing frustration so much as embodying it.
There are individual moments — particularly in the investigation sequences where Pawan is piecing together what actually happened — where the film operates at a level that makes you want the whole thing to be this good. Those moments remind you of the film it could have been.
Sanjay Mishra is, as ever, one of the most reliable presences in Hindi cinema. He brings a kind of moral specificity to his roles that actors with twice his profile rarely manage. What he does here with a character that could easily have become a type is make him feel like a person — complicated, not entirely sympathetic, but genuinely human.
Yudhvir Ahlawat as the killer is a significant and pleasant surprise. He plays the role with a stillness that’s more unsettling than anything overtly threatening could have been. The character doesn’t announce his danger — he just exists with it, and the quietness of the performance is exactly right.
Rasika Dugal, despite limited screen time, does what she consistently does: makes every moment she’s in feel real. Her scenes with Saif as Pawan’s wife carry emotional weight that the film doesn’t always earn, but her performance provides anyway.
The villain is the film’s most significant structural problem. Anand Shri, the antagonist played by Saurabh Dwivedi, is told to us as dangerous rather than shown to us as dangerous. The film repeatedly signals through other characters’ reactions and dialogue that this man is feared, influential, and capable of anything, but the scenes involving him don’t generate the specific unease that should come from spending time in proximity to genuine menace.
A crime thriller’s emotional stakes are largely determined by how dangerous the threat feels. When the threat doesn’t fully land, every scene building toward the confrontation loses proportional impact. This is a writing problem as much as a direction or performance problem, but it affects the film significantly.
The second half’s pacing is inconsistent in ways that compound this. The investigation, which moves with purpose in the first act, starts to circle in the middle of the film. Some scenes feel like the screenplay is marking time between set pieces rather than advancing anything. The runtime starts to feel heavier than it should.
The emotional moments — particularly in the honour killing storyline, where the film has its most powerful thematic material — don’t hit as hard as they should. This is partly a function of the film keeping a certain narrative distance from its characters rather than getting close enough for the audience to fully invest. The story is present; the people inside the story are slightly out of reach.
There’s one specific observation worth making that the film can’t quite resolve: Saif Ali Khan is excellent in this role, but he doesn’t always fully disappear into the rural hinterland setting. His accent and some of his physical mannerisms carry a metropolitan quality that occasionally creates a small gap between the performance and the world the film is constructing around it.
This is a minor thing in individual scenes but accumulates over the course of the film. It doesn’t undermine his performance — which is genuinely strong throughout — but it’s a reminder that the casting, however well-executed, carries a certain inherent tension that the film never fully resolves.
Director Pulkit deserves genuine credit for the ambition here. Making a commercial crime thriller that takes caste discrimination and honour killing seriously — not as backdrop or incidental detail but as the actual moral center of the story — is a meaningful choice. The film doesn’t sensationalize the violence around these themes or treat them as exotic. It presents them as the ordinary horror they are, which is harder and more responsible.
Those thematic choices don’t fix the screenplay’s structural problems, but they give the film a seriousness of purpose that separates it from crime thrillers that use similar settings purely for atmosphere.
Rating: 3/5
Rating Breakdown:
- Story & Screenplay: 3/5
- Performances: 3.5/5
- Direction: 3/5
- Background Score & Cinematography: 3/5
- Emotional Impact: 2.5/5
- Overall Entertainment Value: 3/5
Flickonclick Verdict
Kartavya is a film that lives in the frustrating space between good and great. It has the right ingredients — strong lead performance, relevant subject matter, capable supporting cast, consistent visual tone — but the writing doesn’t fully trust them. The villain is underpowered, the emotional beats are slightly out of reach, and the second half loses the momentum the first act builds so effectively.
Watch it for Saif Ali Khan, who reminds you in every scene why he’s one of Hindi cinema’s most underused talents in this register. Watch it for Sanjay Mishra being quietly excellent, as usual. Watch it for a film that is genuinely trying to say something meaningful about the society it’s depicting.
Just go in with calibrated expectations. Kartavya is a solid one-time watch that engages while it’s running and fades a little faster than you’d want it to once it’s done. There’s a better film inside it trying to get out, and it never quite makes it all the way through.