Halfway through Prakash Kovelamudi’s Judgementall Hai Kya, a contemporary reimagining of the Ramayana becomes central to the narrative. Titled Futuristic Ramayana, the stage play poses an intriguing question: “What if Ravana were chased by Sita?” Interestingly, neither the play nor the film it inhabits has a conventional Ram figure. The battle is solely between Sita and Ravana.
Kangana Ranaut plays Bobby Battliwala Grewal, a Mumbai-based dubbing artist haunted by a traumatic past. She has grown up witnessing chronic domestic violence and later loses both her parents in an accidental death. Diagnosed with acute psychosis, Bobby is expected to remain on medication. She shares a complicated relationship with her manager-cum-boyfriend Varun (Hussain Dalal) and lives alone in a quaint South Mumbai bungalow with her cat, Panauti, for company. One of her defining quirks is her tendency to slip into the personalities of the characters she dubs, a fascinating trait that becomes one of the film’s most important narrative threads and persists until the final frame.
Written by Kanika Dhillon, Bobby is designed as the quintessential social misfit. From her eccentric sartorial choices to her morbid sense of humour, she exists far outside the boundaries of convention. She folds intricate origami using newspaper clippings of gruesome crimes, while her crippling fear of cockroaches gradually assumes narrative significance as the mystery unfolds.
One of the film’s greatest strengths is how difficult it is to categorise during its opening hour. It initially unfolds like an offbeat romantic comedy with shades of absurdist humour, anchored by an unapologetically eccentric protagonist. While Bobby’s mental illness is never explored in great depth, the screenplay cleverly uses her instincts and perceptions to propel the mystery forward. In many ways, Judgementall Hai Kya is Bobby’s story above all else, an attempt to understand human behaviour through the lens of her eccentricities, many of which stem from her clinically diagnosed condition.
Enter Keshav (Rajkummar Rao) and Reema (Amyra Dastur), the new tenants in Bobby’s bungalow. Although initially amused by her peculiar ways, the married couple never attempts to confront or question her behaviour. Instead, they invite her over for dinner and even share a ride during a trip to Lonavala. As Bobby spends more time around Keshav, she begins noticing behavioural quirks that others seem willing to ignore. Her suspicions deepen until one day Reema is found dead.
Bobby is convinced that Keshav is responsible, while the police are eager to dismiss the case as anything but murder. The remainder of Judgementall Hai Kya revolves around uncovering the truth behind Reema’s death, pitting Bobby’s fractured yet instinctive perspective against Keshav’s carefully composed exterior.
Back to the screenplay, Dhillon weaves a remarkable number of ideas into an unusually dense narrative. Judgementall Hai Kya is the kind of film where looking away from the screen, even briefly, could mean missing an important clue. Right from the outset, Bobby’s need to perfect every character she dubs is firmly established. She sees herself as a complete performer, often believing that her voice surpasses the performances she is dubbing. After assaulting a man who molests her during one of her recording sessions, Bobby chooses to spend two months in a psychiatric facility instead of paying a nominal fine. It is a decision that reveals as much about her psyche as it does about her refusal to conform.
Bobby also feels like a subtle tribute to Kangana Ranaut’s own filmography. Fleeting references to Manikarnika and Revolver Rani acknowledge the actor’s history of portraying unconventional women, a privilege usually reserved for male stars in mainstream Indian cinema. Following the upheaval surrounding Reema’s death, the narrative shifts to London, where the film gradually sheds its comic undertones and embraces the grammar of a psychological thriller, with generous doses of psychedelia thrown into the mix.
It is in the third act that the Ramayana metaphor comes into full view, allowing the audience to draw meaningful parallels with Bobby’s journey. Her character remains meticulously written despite the narrative clutter surrounding her, while her adversary, Keshav, suffers from the very opposite problem. Although Rajkummar Rao plays him with admirable restraint, the screenplay offers him little of the complexity required to sustain the central conflict.
There is little doubt that Judgementall Hai Kya belongs to Bobby, and the film earns our investment in her perspective. Yet the decision to paint several supporting characters in broad, single-note strokes ultimately weakens the drama. As a result, the mystery begins to feel increasingly predictable, and the climax lacks the emotional payoff promised by the many fascinating layers that precede it. The final revelation is simply too broad and conventional for a film that spends so much time delighting in ambiguity.
The film truly conjures up a filmmaking masterstroke in its pre-climactic stretch, where Bobby’s hallucinations seamlessly merge with the process of solving the central mystery. While this narrative device is hardly unprecedented in world cinema, it feels refreshingly novel within the landscape of mainstream Hindi films. The use of graffiti, the recurring variations of Tauba Tauba, and the Ramayana metaphor all come together beautifully in the lead-up to the climax, making Judgementall Hai Kya one of the most original films to emerge from the Hindi film industry in recent years.
Pankaj Kumar’s wonderfully eccentric cinematography mirrors Bobby’s restless state of mind with remarkable precision. The camera constantly oscillates between dreamy slow motion and kinetic bursts of energy, immersing us in her fractured perception of reality. Frames alternate between vibrant bursts of colour and dimly lit interiors, enriching the narrative with striking visual texture. Equally effective is the original score, which knows exactly when to be loud and theatrical, and when to quietly drift into horror territory with a series of genuinely unsettling moments. Its impact is further elevated by the film’s exceptional sound design.
The editing, too, refuses to play by conventional rules. Particularly in the final act, the film experiments with framing and transitions in ways that feel refreshingly inventive for commercial Hindi cinema. The dubbing sequences, where Bobby effortlessly slips into the personalities of the characters she voices, blend fluidly with her edgy photoshoots, resulting in some of the film’s most imaginative visual passages.
Kangana Ranaut is sensational as Bobby from the very first frame to the last. She doesn’t strike a single false note throughout her performance. While psychologically fractured characters are hardly unfamiliar territory for the actor, her conviction transforms Bobby into an endlessly fascinating protagonist. Even alongside memorable performances such as Sana from Woh Lamhe and Shonali from Fashion, Bobby comfortably ranks among Ranaut’s finest creations.
Rajkummar Rao, meanwhile, is ultimately let down by an underwritten character rather than his own performance. He does an admirable job of preserving Keshav’s ambiguity and shares convincing chemistry with his co-stars, but the screenplay never allows him to become as layered or compelling as Bobby. Amrita Puri is thoroughly delightful, bringing warmth and impeccable comic timing to her scenes, while Hussain Dalal is consistently entertaining as Bobby’s well-meaning yet dim-witted boyfriend.
Judgementall Hai Kya, which was retitled shortly before release after objections from mental health professionals to the use of the word “Mental”, attempts to justify that decision with reasonable success. More importantly, it pays little attention to how it might be received by a mainstream Hindi film audience accustomed to straightforward storytelling. Instead, it demands active participation, trusting viewers to connect its many clues rather than spoon-feeding every revelation.
In several ways, it recalls the audacity of Aiyyaa (2012) and No Smoking (2007). Like those films, Judgementall Hai Kya gleefully jumbles genres to create something unapologetically original, making the most of its actors and technicians in the process. Even where the screenplay falters, it is Kanika Dhillon’s writing that ultimately defines the film. She scatters clues with admirable confidence, rewarding attentive viewers willing to engage with its densely layered narrative.
That confidence, however, makes the final stretch all the more frustrating. After constructing such an intricate web of ideas, the film settles for a climax that feels surprisingly conventional. Bobby’s victory lacks the emotional inevitability that the narrative has spent two hours building towards, while the closing monologue raises more questions than it answers, particularly in the way it addresses the psychological conditions of multiple characters. One cannot help but wonder whether this was the inevitable compromise of making an otherwise uncompromising film commercially accessible.
Even with its uneven finale, Judgementall Hai Kya remains one of the boldest and most inventive Hindi films of its decade. Prakash Kovelamudi’s audacious direction, Kanika Dhillon’s richly layered screenplay and Kangana Ranaut’s extraordinary performance ensure that the film continues to invite discussion years after its release. Had the climax matched the brilliance of everything leading up to it, Judgementall Hai Kya might well have stood as a landmark achievement in mainstream Indian cinema. Even so, it remains a daring, convention-defying work whose ambition deserves to be celebrated.
Rating: ★★★½
Judgementall Hai Kya is now streaming on Zee5.
