Why the Dhurandhar Meltdown Feels Bigger Than the Film

Why Dhurandhar Sparked a Cultural Panic that Goes Beyond Cinema and Politics

Dhurandhar has sparked an unusually loud reaction for a film that many liberal commentators openly said they did not want to watch. However, days after its release, it dominated opinion columns, social media debates, and review threads.

The paradox is striking: refusal turned into fixation. The outrage has functioned as free publicity, drawing curious audiences into theatres even as the cultural discourse around the film grows increasingly heated.

The division is predictable; one camp frames Dhurandhar as a moral and political emergency, while the other celebrates it as a long-overdue flexing of muscular mainstream cinema.

The film is lost between these two elements as it is a work far more interested in craft than controversy.

Reluctant Viewing, Relentless Commentary

Most remarkable is how much of this backlash comes from critics approaching the film with evident reluctance. Well before the film’s release, many liberals had already assumed Dhurandhar would be no more than an exercise in blunt nationalism.

However, the film got involved in cultural discourse, argued over with an energy and passion usually saved for those films that sit far more comfortably within more progressive perspectives.

This reaction suggests that the discomfort runs far deeper than disagreement. The debate is not only about what this film is saying, but about the confidence with which it says it.

Ideological Question Cannot Be Dodged

Dhurandhar makes no secret of its admiration for the Modi-era security doctrine. R Madhavan’s Intelligence Bureau Chief states power with clarity rather than ambiguity. For a section of critics, such straightforwardness is enough to render the film an ideological provocation and, therefore, fair game for scrutiny that is not strictly film criticism.

However, similar nationalism packaged by Hollywood has rarely generated outrage of a similar proportion. Films such as Top Gun: Maverick, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, and The Hurt Locker have been uniformly praised for craft, with ideology treated as ancillary.

The sharp reaction to Dhurandhar raises uncomfortable questions about selective discomfort when nationalism appears closer to home.

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Not the Propaganda It is Accused of

What complicates the ease of such categorisation is that Dhurandhar resists clean heroism, allowing Ranveer Singh’s deeply embedded intelligence operative, Hamza, to inadvertently enable the very terror attack he is trying to prevent. It is also a film that allows patriotism to slide into moral failure, state power as fallible, consequence-laden, rather than triumphalist.

This narrative choice deflates any claims that the film can be crudely dismissed for being an ideological love-fest. Instead, it introduces a real ambiguity that both supporters and detractors alike seem to ignore.

Creation as True Disruptor

Aditya Dhar’s direction is sure-handed and immersive. Karachi’s underworld is rendered with granular detail. The violence is brutal but purposeful, and the music, a heady mix of qawwali, rock, and hip-hop, leaves a visceral impact. For long, artistic sophistication was something assumed to belong to an ideological class.

Dhurandhar came and shook that assumption. The panic, then, isn’t strictly political. It’s cultural. The film reminds one that cinema is first felt, then judged, and that discomfort often follows when the film works far better than expected.

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