Review: Haiwaan

Haiwaan gets exactly one thing unambiguously right, and it is Saif Ali Khan. Playing a blind caretaker with heightened senses, he carries the maximum share of the screen time and earns it, convincing in the quiet, damaged stretches and credible in the action beats that ask him to fight men he cannot see. It is the most committed work he has put in for a while, and the film is genuinely better whenever he is the one holding the frame.

The trouble is almost everything built around him. Priyadarshan's own adaptation of his 2016 Malayalam original, Oppam, keeps the bones of that story but the screenplay he has co-written this time is thin, stretched and disjointed in ways the source material never was. Akshay Kumar's villain is asked to be genuinely frightening and instead comes across oddly pitched, his line readings tipping into the over-the-top register at moments the scene needed restraint. Boman Irani is reliably solid in limited screen time, but Saiyami Kher's inspector feels like a retread of a role she has already played better elsewhere, and the plot leans on the kind of convenient superhuman ability, a blind man stopping a ball mid-air, taking down four armed men unassisted, that asks for a suspension of disbelief the film never earns. The climax, which needed to land hardest, lands softest.

The trouble is almost everything built around him.

Two and a half stars. Saif Ali Khan alone is worth the price of admission, and Priyadarshan still knows how to stage an individual sequence when he commits to one. But a reunion this anticipated deserved a script with the same conviction as its leads, and this one never finds it.