Raman Raghav 2.0 is a meditation in pure evil

We are soulmates, you and I.

Everyone needs someone to complete them. You were looking for it in a woman. I wasn't. I always knew you completed me.

That's Raman speaking to Raghav in Anurag Kashyap's dark and dank Raman Raghav 2.0.

Cat footing across tin roofs of slums, picking up a half-eaten burger from the railway station, trailing an iron rod in grimy streets. Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Raman is a man who functions as Yamraj's doot. The devil's messenger kills people on order.

Also read: What Nawazuddin's Raman Raghav 2.0 says about Bollywood's psychopaths

Just like you, he tells the cocaine-snorting police officer, Raghav, played by Vicky Kaushal (who was brilliant in Masaan and is equally electric here). You have a licence to kill those who need to be eliminated. I have the authority of god. 

Raman Raghav 2.0 is a meditation in pure evil. This is violence stripped of ideology, rationale, or purpose. There is the violence of the mob in a riot, there is the violence of the faithful. But sometimes there is violence purely for itself.

In Kashyap's Raman Raghav 2.0, the city is a harvest of horrors, its blingy, glossy exterior hiding the grime underneath.

The starlets who dance in Dubai and party in Mumbai. The African smugglers who sell drugs to a hungry city. The policemen who are as twisted as the people they are paid to protect. The parents who let their fists do the talking. The mothers who never want to let go.

The hunter and the hunted are interchangeable here. There are no heroes and no villains. There are only the wounded and those who wound.

Raman's iron rod is indiscriminate. It can murder children, women, men. There are no particular reasons. It could be a man who is standing in his path, stepping on his imaginary black stripe. It can be a woman who happened to have the keys to the flat of another woman he is stalking. The creature of the night, a nishachar, will devour them whole. 

Yet there is almost something soulful in the narrative he has built in his head about himself as Ravana.

Both Raman and Raghav are outsiders to the system. They do not abide by the rules that govern other people. If Raghav forces his girlfriend to abort, Raman thinks nothing of talking of sleeping with his sister. There is nothing of the blood, except that which must be shed.

Kashyap unleashes the demons trapped in our soul and watches as we squirm as Raman wields his weapons - sometimes a stone, at other times an iron rod. 

But it's the banality of evil that Kashyap shows us. How each one of us is a behooda, to quote from the amazingly febrile pen of Varun Grover. As the song in the film goes:

Ek dhakka aur de/Saare dhage tod de/Peene ke paani mein/Zeher ki naali chod de

Itna bhi jo karna sake/To phir kahe ka guda/Teri khal mein renge keede/Tu sachcha behooda

We are all Ramans, we are all Raghavs, some more so than others.

Welcome to the world of behoodas, leave your hypocrisies behind.