The Art of Creating Dhurandhar: How Aditya Dhar Built a New Marvel for Indian Cinema
When Aditya Dhar debuted as a director with URI: The Surgical Strike in January 2019, the Hindi film industry was caught off guard. A mid-budget, precisely crafted thriller about India’s cross-border military operation became one of the highest-grossing Hindi films ever made — not through spectacle alone, but through an unflinching commitment to narrative discipline and emotional precision. The phrase “How’s the josh?” entered the national lexicon. Vicky Kaushal became a superstar overnight. And Aditya Dhar announced himself as one of the most important directors of his generation.
Then came the wait. Six years of silence, rumours, and expectation. When Dhurandhar finally arrived on 5 December 2025, it carried the weight of everything URI had promised — and then some.
A Director Who Thinks in Franchise
What makes Dhurandhar remarkable as a creative project isn’t merely the individual film — it’s the architectural thinking behind it. Aditya Dhar conceived Dhurandhar not as a standalone story but as the first chapter of a two-part saga, with Dhurandhar: The Revenge following just over three months later in March 2026. This back-to-back release model, rare in Indian cinema outside the South, signals a filmmaker who had the story completely mapped before a single frame was shot.
The franchise instinct is new territory for mainstream Hindi filmmaking. Bollywood has historically struggled with sequels — they arrive years later, often with diminished creative energy and the wrong reasons behind them. Dhar took the opposite approach: complete the story first, then release it in two chapters timed close enough together that the narrative momentum carries across both films. It is a strategy borrowed from the best of international streaming and franchise cinema, applied to the theatrical experience.
The Ensemble Bet
Casting Ranveer Singh in the lead was itself a statement of intent. Post Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, Singh had been searching for a project that would channel his considerable energies into something tightly authored. Dhurandhar offers exactly that — a lead character with internal complexity, placed inside a thriller architecture that demands restraint as much as intensity.
Around Singh, Dhar assembled one of the most formidable ensembles in recent Hindi film memory. Sanjay Dutt, Akshaye Khanna, R. Madhavan, and Arjun Rampal — each a heavyweight in his own right, each capable of holding the frame independently — are woven into a world where no single star dominates. This is the key signature of Dhar’s direction: he creates films in which the story is the star, and the actors serve the story.
Akshaye Khanna deserves particular mention. One of Bollywood’s most underrated talents, Khanna has in recent years delivered precise, unsettling performances in films like Section 375 and Thar. His presence in Dhurandhar signals the kind of intelligence Dhar brings to casting: choosing actors for what they can actually do, not what their market positioning suggests.
Shashwat Sachdev and the Sound of the Dhurandharverse
No analysis of what makes Dhurandhar work can ignore the contribution of composer Shashwat Sachdev. His score for URI was arguably the most important non-visual element of that film — it transformed tactical sequences into emotional events, giving the film its heartbeat. On Dhurandhar, Sachdev and Dhar are working with an expanded canvas. The musical architecture of a two-part thriller requires different thinking: themes must be introduced, complicated, and resolved across approximately five hours of combined runtime.
Sachdev approaches film scoring the way a novelist approaches structure. Motifs introduced in Dhurandhar reappear transformed in The Revenge. It is a compositional sophistication rarely seen in commercial Hindi cinema, and it is one of the reasons the Dhar-Sachdev collaboration deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as the great director-composer partnerships of Indian film history.
The Visual Grammar of a Thriller
Cinematographer Vikash Nowlakha, who shot Dhurandhar: The Revenge, brought a visual language calibrated to the demands of the sequel’s escalating stakes. Thriller filmmaking at the scale Dhar operates demands a particular skill: the ability to make complex tactical scenarios legible to a general audience without ever condescending to them. The best action-thriller cinematography makes geography clear, keeps spatial relationships coherent under pressure, and uses light and shadow to carry emotional information that dialogue cannot.
Nowlakha achieves this in The Revenge — a film that operates across multiple locations and timelines without ever losing the viewer.
What Dhurandhar Proves About Hindi Cinema
The deepest lesson of the Dhurandhar project is about authorship. In an era where Hindi cinema is constantly in debate about the dominance of South Indian productions, OTT disruption, and the fragmentation of the theatrical audience, Dhurandhar makes the case that Hindi cinema’s strength lies not in competing on scale with RRR or Kalki 2898 AD, but in developing the kind of precisely authored, emotionally grounded thriller that no other film industry in India does quite the same way.
Dhar is not chasing the pan-India formula. He is building something more specific and, ultimately, more durable: a director’s cinema that happens to operate at blockbuster scale. That is a very difficult thing to do. And in Dhurandhar, he has done it twice.
Dhurandhar (2025) and Dhurandhar: The Revenge (2026) are both directed by Aditya Dhar and star Ranveer Singh, Sanjay Dutt, Akshaye Khanna, R. Madhavan, and Arjun Rampal. Music by Shashwat Sachdev.