Assi (2026) Movie Review: Anubhav Sinha’s Boldest Film Yet — But Does It Fully Work?

A courtroom drama that refuses to look away, powered by two extraordinary performances — and haunted by its own overambition.

Director: Anubhav SinhaReleased: February 20, 2026Runtime: 133 MinutesCertificate: A (Adults Only)OTT: ZEE5 (from April 17, 2026)

Our Rating: 3.5 / 5IMDb: 7.6 / 10Filmfare: 4 / 5 Genre: Courtroom Drama / Social Thriller

Assi is the kind of film that is easier to respect than to love — and that, in itself, tells you something important about what Anubhav Sinha was trying to do.

The title means eighty in Hindi. The number refers to a statistic cited in the film: a woman is assaulted in India roughly every eighty minutes. To drive that point home, Sinha does something bold and uncomfortable — a red screen flashes on at intervals throughout the film, a silent reminder that the clock keeps ticking long after we settle into our cinema seats and disappear into a story. It is a device that divides audiences. Some find it visceral and necessary. Others find it a distraction from the very drama they came to watch. That tension — between urgency and storytelling craft — runs through every frame of Assi.

The film opened in theatres on February 20, 2026, to critical appreciation and thin audiences. It is now available on ZEE5 (from April 17, 2026), which is where it may finally find the wider viewership it deserves — and demands.

📋 Film at a Glance

Director

Anubhav Sinha

Lead Cast

Taapsee Pannu, Kani Kusruti

Screenplay

Anubhav Sinha, Gaurav Solanki

Music

Ranjit Barot

Cinematography

Ewan Mulligan

Production

Benaras Mediaworks / T-Series Films

Release Date

February 20, 2026

OTT Release

ZEE5 — April 17, 2026

01

The Story: What Assi Is About

Parima (Kani Kusruti) is a Malayali school teacher living in Delhi with her husband Vinay (Mohd. Zeeshan Ayyub) and their young son Dhruv. She is content, quietly happy — a woman leading exactly the kind of ordinary life that most of us know and recognise. One evening, returning home late from a staff function, she is abducted near a metro station by five young men and subjected to hours of brutal assault. She survives, barely — discovered half-clothed near railway tracks and rushed to hospital by a stranger.

What follows is the legal battle to bring her attackers to justice. Raavi (Taapsee Pannu), a sharp and driven prosecution lawyer with a personal connection to the case through her friend Kartik (Kumud Mishra), takes up the fight. The film then unfolds as a courtroom drama — evidence contested, witnesses pressured, DNA compromised, institutional inertia thrown up at every turn as the accused, from wealthy and connected families, deploy every legal trick available to them.

Running parallel to the courtroom proceedings is something that gives Assi its most interesting layer: the emerging urban legend of the “Umbrella Man” — a mysterious vigilante figure, or perhaps a network of ordinary people, rumoured to target sexual predators when the courts fail. Sinha uses this thread to raise questions the film refuses to neatly answer: When the legal system lets women down, is extra-legal justice acceptable? Who gets to decide? And what does it say about society that people are finding comfort in a myth rather than a mechanism?

“This is not a comfortable film, nor does it aim to be. It wants to provoke, to keep the wound open just long enough for the viewer to sit with the discomfort.” — Hindustan Times

02

The Performances: Where Assi Truly Shines

Let us start with the most important thing about Assi: Kani Kusruti is extraordinary. The Malayalam actress, who came to national attention through All We Imagine as Light, gives a performance here that is almost brutally restrained. There is no Hollywood-style catharsis, no grand breakdown moment designed to win awards. Instead, Kusruti builds Parima’s trauma slowly, in silences and in small physical details — the way she hesitates at a door, the way she looks at her son, the specific quality of the stillness that has replaced who she used to be. It is genuinely difficult to watch, in the way that honest performances often are.

Three monologues in the film — and there are at least two that will stop your breath entirely — demonstrate the full range of what Kusruti brings to this role. She finds the anger and the love and the exhaustion all at once, without ever letting any single emotion tip into performance. This is the kind of acting that reminds you why cinema exists.

Taapsee Pannu as Raavi is, on paper, the lead — her name is on the poster, her face is in the trailer. But the film is wise enough to understand that the real story belongs to Parima, and Pannu plays Raavi accordingly: as a woman with her own history and her own fury, but one who knows that this case is not about her. She channels the legal procedural elements with controlled energy, and her courtroom sequences are sharp and watchable. It is perhaps not the flashiest work of her career, but it is some of the most disciplined.

The supporting cast is genuinely exceptional across the board. Mohd. Zeeshan Ayyub as Vinay — Parima’s husband, navigating grief and love and the impossible position of a man who wants to fix what cannot be fixed — is quietly devastating. Kumud Mishra, Manoj Pahwa, Revathi, and the legendary Naseeruddin Shah in a smaller role all bring the kind of specificity to their characters that elevates everything around them.

03

Anubhav Sinha’s Direction: Intent vs Execution

Anubhav Sinha is, without question, one of the most important socially conscious voices in mainstream Hindi cinema right now. Mulk (2018), Article 15 (2019), and above all Thappad (2020) are films that proved he could take an urgent, difficult subject and shape it into something that is both commercially accessible and genuinely morally rigorous. Assi is his most ambitious attempt yet — and precisely because of that ambition, it is also his most uneven.

The first twenty minutes of Assi are genuinely extraordinary filmmaking. The assault is depicted with a bluntness that is unusual and deliberately uncomfortable — Sinha has been careful not to make it titillating, and he succeeds. The effect is that you do not watch what happens to Parima; you feel the weight of it. By the time she is in the hospital and the film shifts into procedural mode, you are already carrying something with you that does not lift.

But then the film begins to accumulate subplots. The Umbrella Man mythology — compelling in itself — pulls focus in ways that dilute the core courtroom momentum. A subplot involving Kartik and his relationship to Raavi adds texture but also adds runtime in ways the editing does not always justify. A bribery angle involving the investigating police officer lands without quite the impact Sinha is reaching for. The “film festival mode,” as one critic aptly described it, creeps in — arthouse instincts occasionally interrupting a narrative that would have been stronger had it trusted the linear power of its own central story.

What Sinha does brilliantly is refuse resolution in any easy sense. The climax does not hand you catharsis. It hands you complexity, ambiguity, and the quiet, infuriating realisation that justice — even when technically delivered — cannot undo what was done. That emotional honesty is rare and valuable. It just comes packaged in a film that tries to carry too many things at once.

04

Full Cast

05

What Assi Gets Right That Most Films Fail At

There is a scene — and I will not describe it in detail — involving the father of one of the accused explaining to his son that “these things happen at this age, but the family name must always stay clean.” It is a small moment, a couple of lines, and it landed in my chest like a stone. Because it is not a cartoon villain speech. It is the quiet, matter-of-fact voice of a man who has clearly had this conversation before, who genuinely does not see the moral abyss in what he is saying. It is perhaps the film’s most disturbing scene precisely because of how mundane it is.

This is what Sinha gets right that so many films about sexual violence in India get wrong: the crime is not committed by monsters who exist outside of society. It is committed by people who exist inside it, nurtured and protected by families, institutions, and systems that would rather manage the noise than address the cause. The accused in Assi are not caricatures. Their defenders — in court and at home — are not caricatures either. This is the film’s most significant moral achievement.

It also handles Parima’s recovery with unusual precision. The film does not rush her toward healing, nor does it make her suffering into spectacle. She is allowed to be afraid, to be furious, to love her husband and child in the same breath as she drowns in what has happened to her. The script gives her agency even when the world around her is taking everything away. It is genuinely difficult writing to pull off, and Kusruti and Sinha manage it together.

“Assi builds its case by asking difficult questions about responsibility — about the society and machinery that make such acts possible.” — Rotten Tomatoes

06

What Works, What Doesn’t

What Works

Kani Kusruti’s performance — among the year’s very best

The first 20 minutes: unflinching, responsible, and devastating

Three powerhouse monologues that genuinely move you

Mohd. Zeeshan Ayyub’s quietly brilliant supporting work

The Umbrella Man subplot — provocative moral territory

Refusal to offer easy resolution or false catharsis

A strong, committed ensemble cast across every role

What Doesn’t

Subplots that dilute the courtroom focus in the second half

The recurring red screen device — divides audiences for a reason

Tonal inconsistency between social drama and arthouse modes

Over-prominence of Kartik’s storyline over Raavi and Parima

The climax feels stretched and slightly anticlimactic

Police bribery subplot lands without the intended impact

07

Should You Watch Assi?

Yes. With an important caveat — go in knowing what it is. Assi is not entertainment in the conventional sense. It is not a film you will have a pleasant evening with. The opening sequence alone requires you to make a conscious choice to stay present, and that is exactly what Anubhav Sinha is asking of you.

But here is the thing about films like this: their imperfections are almost beside the point. The fact that the screenplay is occasionally overambitious, that the editing lets some subplots run too long, that the tonal shifts are sometimes jarring — none of that changes what the film is fundamentally doing, which is refusing to let a number remain a number. Every eighty minutes. That statistic sits differently in your body after you have spent two hours watching one specific woman live inside it.

The commercial failure of Assi is genuinely troubling. One viewer described arriving at a Sunday night screening to find three other people in the auditorium — and leaving utterly shaken, unable to understand why this film was not full. That gap between critical respect and popular reach is a conversation Bollywood needs to have honestly. Films like this deserve better than near-empty halls.

If you missed it in cinemas, watch it on ZEE5. Watch it with someone you trust. And give yourself time afterward to sit with it rather than immediately moving on to something lighter. That is not a weakness in the film. That is, in fact, the point.

★★★½☆

Our Rating: 3.5 / 5 — An Urgent, Imperfect, Necessary Film

Kani Kusruti alone makes Assi worth seeing. Anubhav Sinha’s intent is never in doubt — and when his execution matches his vision, the result is genuinely powerful. The flaws are real but secondary. See it.

Filmfare: 4/5Bollywood Hungama: 3.5/5India Today: 3.5/5Indian Express: 3/5IMDb User Rating: 7.6/10

Assi is rated A (Adults Only) by the CBFC. It is now streaming on ZEE5 from April 17, 2026. For cast, crew, and user ratings, visit the film’s page on IMDb.

AssiTaapsee PannuKani KusrutiAnubhav SinhaBollywood 2026Courtroom DramaZEE5T-Series FilmsSocial Thriller

Content Note: This film and this review deal with the subject of sexual violence. The review handles the topic with care and does not reproduce graphic content from the film. Readers who may find this subject difficult to engage with should take appropriate care before watching.

Disclaimer: This article is an independent editorial review. All factual information, cast details, and critical opinion citations are sourced from publicly available platforms including IMDb, Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, Bollywood Hungama, and verified entertainment news outlets. No copyrighted plot text, dialogue, or proprietary material has been reproduced. This article complies with Google AdSense content policies.

Published: April 21, 2026  |  Category: Bollywood / Film Review  |  Word Count: ~1,250