Haider

11/15/2022

As a Shakespearean actor, I can tell you this film is the BEST adaptation of one of his plays I have ever seen. It is in the same class as Kurasawa's RAN. It is a brilliantly written screenplay, and both directed and performed at the very highest level. Bhardwaj has taken quite a bit of liberty with the sequence and story line, but not so much that it is unrecognizable from the Bard's work. Even the name of the mysterious revolutionary, Roohdaar means "spirit" in Hindi - or ghost. Much more importantly, Bhardwaj has used the play as a tool to relate and comment on a dark period in the history of the animosity between India and Pakistan. And like Kurasawa, he blatantly rails against revenge and war.