A film that revisits Direct Action Day
A three-hour-and-twenty-minute Hindi film about one of the bloodiest chapters in pre-Partition Bengal was never going to be a quiet release. The Bengal Files, directed by Vivek Agnihotri, arrives loaded with expectation, pushback, and a fair amount of dread. It tells two stories at once: the 1946 Direct Action Day carnage in Calcutta and a present-day mystery that keeps dragging the past into the room. In screenings across cities, you can feel the split in the audiencesome watch in stunned silence, some weep, a few walk out during the most graphic passages.
The spine of the film is simple: a missing girl in todays Bengal forces a group of people to confront history they would rather bury. Darshan Kumaar plays Shiv Pandit, a Kashmiri Pandit police officer who wears his own exile like a scar. Hes called in to find the girl and, in the process, he meets Bharati Banerjee (Pallavi Joshi), a genocide survivor living with PTSD and dementia. Her memory is a broken mirror. Every shard points back to the 1940s, when Direct Action Day turned neighborhoods into killing fields.
The period timeline is carried by young Bharati (Simrat Kaur Randhawa), whose family is wiped out in the riots, and by Amar Singh Rathod (Eklavya Sood), a Sikh who steps in to save her. In the present, the needle of suspicion swings between Bharati and a local MLA, Sardar Husseini, played with oily assurance by Saswata Chatterjee. The film makes no secret of its intent: it wants to show how the architecture of hate can survive decades, just with different faces and slogans.
Mithun Chakraborty shows up as a former cop who drinks to dull what he couldnt fix. His character stands for a certain stubborn moral linethe people who stayed and fought when it wouldve been easier to look away. Namashi Chakrabortys Ghulam Sarwar Husseini, brutal and swaggering, personifies the foot soldiers who carry out the violence while others pull the strings in back rooms. Anupam Kher appears in a brief but pointed part, adding weight to the present-day investigation.
Agnihotri stages the 1946 sequences as a nightmare lived in daylight. The camera pushes into cramped lanes, then widens to show streets choked with smoke and terror. You dont just see mobs; you feel the stampede. The choices are deliberate. The film insists that to talk honestly about mass violence, you cant tidy it up for comfort.
Direct Action Day is one of those dates that can still make a room tense. It preceded Partition and left thousands dead in Calcutta over days of unchecked riots. The film does not give a history lecture. It picks a handful of lives and lets the horror spill out from there. Those who want academic nuance wont find it here; what you get is a vivid, gut-level telling. Whether that is enough depends on what you expect from cinema that handles traumatic memory.
Craft, performances, and the politics around it
The craft is the films strongest argument. Cinematographer Attar Singh Saini builds frames that look torn out of a war diarysmoke, sweat, flickers of fire, and eyes that dont blink. Even in quieter scenes, the visual texture buzzes. You can feel the weight of lathis, the thud of doors kicked in, the shiver of a crowd on the verge of tipping over. The staging is tighter and more deliberate than Agnihotris earlier work in Vaccine War. He seems more sure of where to place the camera and when to hold it there.
But the same relentlessness that gives the film its power also raises ethical questions. The violence is explicit: mutilated bodies, blood pooling on stone steps, assaults that are hard to watch. The films defenders say sanitizing this would be dishonest. Critics worry it veers into shock for impact. Both things can be true. Trauma on screen can awaken empathy, and it can also harden divides. The line is thin, and the film often walks it at speed.
Darshan Kumaar anchors the present-day track with a performance that balances anger and restraint. His monologue on what it means to carry a communal tag in an independent republic lands with force because he says it like a man whos tired of slogans, not hungry for applause. Pallavi Joshi, playing a survivor trapped inside looping memories, doesnt reach for theatrics. She gives Bharatis confusion a quiet rhythmwords that start, stall, and spiral back to where they began. Its one of those parts that can feel showy on paper but ends up intimate on screen.
Mithun Chakrabortys fallen cop brings needed texture, a reminder that institutions are made of people who age and break. Saswata Chatterjee is effective as a small-town heavyweight who flips between charm, menace, and victimhood depending on whos in the room. Simrat Kaur Randhawa and Eklavya Sood carry the moral weight of the flashbacks without whining it out. Namashi Chakrabortys turn as Ghulam Sarwar Husseini is pitched higha choice that will divide viewersbut it fits the films angry register. And Anupam Kher, in limited time, leaves the imprint of a man who knows the rules and their loopholes.
As writing, the film is blunt. Agnihotri narrows a messy historical sprawl into a handful of faces, a method he used in The Kashmir Files. The upside is focus; the downside is flattening. Villains are often sketched in thick strokes: corrupt power brokers, cynical clerics, and henchmen who treat ideology like a uniform. The good are upright, the cowards slink, and middle spaces are rare. When youre documenting calamity, complexity is not a luxury but a tool. The film embraces ambiguity in mood but less so in character.
The political claims will keep the conversation hot. The script calls out vote-bank games and demographic shifts driven by illegal immigration. It draws a straight line from 1946 to the present, arguing that the playbook hasnt changed so much as the slogans. Supporters see this as overdue truth-telling. Opponents call it a loaded framing that can deepen fault lines. Both camps agree on one thing: the film doesnt hedge.
What does the present-day mystery add? It gives the narrative a hook and a clock. A missing girl creates urgency that history lessons often lack. It also lets the film ask harder questions without breaking the flow: What do we owe the dead? Who gets to tell the story of a riot? When does remembrance heal, and when does it become a weapon? The investigation becomes a device to surface these arguments without turning the film into a lecture.
Technically, the film is built to overwhelm. The sound design leans into chaos: sirens, chants, glass shattering, the dull ring that follows an explosion. The score swells oftensometimes too oftennudging emotions that the images already handle. Editing-wise, the back-and-forth between eras is mostly clean, but a few jumps feel engineered rather than earned. The runtime is a test. A leaner cut could have kept the punch while sparing the repetition that creeps into the last hour.
Theres also the question of emphasis. The film is at its most arresting when it stays with survivors in moments after the violence: a woman counting breaths before she speaks, a man staring at a street he no longer recognizes, a rescued child forgetting how to be held. These small details do more than any speech. When the script switches to speechifyingand it does, oftenthe truth it wants to underline starts to feel like an argument rather than a memory.
How does the city come off? Calcutta is shown as both stage and character, a place where power changes hands but the alleys remember. Period production design recreates mid-1940s texturesshuttered shopfronts, crowded markets, colonial facades shadowed by fear. In the present day, the city breathes a different anxiety, more bureaucratic than raw, but the paranoia rhymes. The contrast is not subtle, yet it works.
What about historical rigor? The film isnt pretending to be a documentary; its a story told through chosen angles. It uses documented milestones and eyewitness-style vignettes but funnels them into a dramatic arc centered on a few emblematic players. For some viewers, thats an honest way to talk about catastrophe without drowning in footnotes. For others, its a framing that risks turning historical complexity into moral clarity a beat too fast. The responsible way to watch, perhaps, is to let the film provoke and then read widely around it.
Audience response has been intense. Many viewers have reported being rattled by the scale of the violence and the intimacy of the losses. That doesnt automatically translate into agreement with the films politics. It does, however, show that there is spaceand appetitefor cinema that forces a confrontation with painful chapters most textbooks skim over. Whether that confrontation opens doors or slams them shut will depend on how the larger cultural conversation holds up once the credits roll.
Agnihotri himself seems more in command here than in Vaccine War. The staging is sharper, and the momentum holds longer. He still favors monologues that explain the theme rather than let it emerge, and he still trusts provocation more than subtext. But hes found a way to align his form with his intent: a bruising immersion in a time when neighbors turned on neighbors and institutions blinked.
For a film this long and this charged, what lingers? A handful of faces, mostly. A child staring through soot-streaked glass. A cop who cant tell if hes chasing a suspect or a ghost. A survivor who forgets the present because the past is louder. And the suggestion that a nations memory is always up for a fresh fightin courts, in legislatures, and, yes, in cinemas.
If you expect polish, youll find plenty of it in the images. If you want balance, youll have to supply some of that yourself. The film is not trying to please everyone. Its trying to tell you that the ground under your feet was soaked long before you arrived, and that the stains dont fade just because weve learned new slogans.
Does that make it necessary viewing? Thats your call. What cant be denied is the force of the attempta filmmaker leaning into a contested history, a cast carrying heavy freight, and a theater full of people discovering their thresholds. As a piece of cinema, its ambitious, rough-edged, and emotionally relentless. As a cultural event, its a spark in dry grass.
Heres the quick ledger many will be weighing as they step out into the lobby:
- What works: muscular craft, immersive riot staging, Darshan Kumaars steady center, Pallavi Joshis aching interiority.
- What falters: blunt character writing, sermon-like monologues, a runtime that tests patience, violence that risks numbing.
- What lingers: the eerie rhyme between 1946 and now, the queasy aftertaste of unresolved grief, the sense that memory itself is a battleground.
Whether you walk out shaken, angry, or skeptical, the film makes sure you dont walk out untouched.