Haiwaan Review: Priyadarshan Delivers a Gripping Thriller Where Saif and Akshay Set the Screen Ablaze

There is a particular pleasure in watching a filmmaker who understands the mechanics of a theatrical thriller without treating the audience like a hostage. With Haiwaan, Priyadarshan returns to the big screen with a film that knows precisely when to tighten the screws and when to loosen them. It is a thriller built on danger, deception and escalating dread, but it is also unmistakably a Priyadarshan film—one in which humour can suddenly surface in the middle of anxiety, where eccentric characters coexist with genuinely frightening ones, and where entertainment is never treated as a dirty word.

The film’s greatest achievement is its command of momentum. Priyadarshan does not allow the narrative to sit still for long. One development feeds into another, seemingly innocuous details acquire significance, and the tension keeps accumulating until the film reaches an explosive interval. The second half sustains that momentum before the story hurtles towards an emphatic, adrenaline-charged climax. Haiwaan understands an increasingly forgotten cinematic truth: a thriller does not necessarily need to be relentlessly grim to be gripping.

What gives the film its dramatic electricity, however, is the collision between its two central characters. Saif Ali Khan and Akshay Kumar are not merely playing opposing sides of a conflict; they are operating in entirely different registers, and the film derives enormous energy from that contrast.

As Shyam, Saif Ali Khan gives one of those performances that is deceptively controlled. Shyam is visually impaired, but the screenplay refuses to define him by his blindness. His heightened senses—especially his ability to hear and smell with extraordinary precision—become instruments of survival. Khan plays this not as a sentimental disability narrative but as a study in intelligence, instinct and self-possession. There is no self-pity in his performance, and very little theatricality. Instead, Khan gives Shyam an almost quiet ferocity. His stillness becomes a form of strength.

That restraint also makes his physical moments more effective. When Shyam is forced into action, Khan brings an unexpected physicality to the role, and the choreography allows his character’s heightened awareness to become part of the suspense rather than merely a convenient plot device. It is a performance that trusts the audience to understand the character without constantly explaining him.

Then comes Akshay Kumar’s Parshuram—and the temperature of the film changes.

Kumar plays him with a darkness that is considerably more unsettling than simple villainy. There is something almost gleeful about the character’s menace, but it is never reduced to caricature. His troubled past adds psychological weight, while Kumar’s ability to make a pause, a glance or a smile feel vaguely threatening gives Parshuram an unpredictable quality. He doesn’t merely enter scenes; he alters their atmosphere.

And when Khan and Kumar finally collide, Haiwaan comes alive in a different way. Their confrontations work because neither actor tries to out-perform the other. Khan’s controlled, inward intensity meets Kumar’s more volatile menace, creating a fascinating push and pull. The film’s most compelling moments are consequently not necessarily its loudest ones, but those in which these two men are simply watching, listening and trying to anticipate one another.

Priyadarshan’s direction is particularly assured when he confines his characters within physical spaces. An apartment confrontation between Shyam and Parshuram becomes a nerve-shredding exercise in anticipation. An elevator sequence extracts maximum tension from the simple fact of being trapped in a limited space with danger nearby. Even the police-station confrontation, which could easily have been treated as a routine procedural scene, acquires considerable dramatic force.

These sequences reveal a director who understands that suspense is often about what the audience imagines rather than what it sees. The waiting, the pauses, the sound of something approaching, the uncertainty about what a character knows—these are the building blocks of Haiwaan‘s most effective moments.

The film also benefits enormously from knowing when not to take itself too seriously. The comic passages involving Asrani, Sharib Hashmi and Rajpal Yadav provide a welcome throwback to the particular brand of situational humour associated with Priyadarshan. Their interrogation and dialogue scenes are amusing precisely because they are allowed to breathe. They don’t feel like desperate attempts to manufacture laughs in an otherwise serious thriller. They emerge from character and circumstance.

The supporting performances keep the emotional architecture of the film intact. Boman Irani, Shriya Pilgaonkar and Saiyami Kher lend credibility and substance to the world around the protagonists, while young Pahal Chaudhry delivers a striking performance that gives the stakes an emotional dimension beyond the mechanics of the thriller. Her presence prevents the film from becoming merely an elaborate game of cat and mouse.

Technically, Haiwaan knows how to create an atmosphere without drowning in it. Pritam’s music is deployed with restraint, while the background score becomes particularly effective when the narrative begins to accelerate. Sound is especially important in a film whose protagonist experiences the world through heightened senses, and the film makes intelligent use of that element to amplify suspense. The action, meanwhile, is slick and purposeful rather than gratuitously ornamental.

What distinguishes Haiwaan, ultimately, is its confidence in the idea of entertainment. Priyadarshan isn’t attempting to disguise a commercial thriller as something more respectable. He embraces its genre pleasures—twists, confrontations, action, humour, emotion and a crowd-pleasing climax—and executes them with the assurance of a filmmaker who knows exactly how a theatrical audience responds to rhythm.

There is even room for a charming late-film cameo, a small flourish that adds to the sense that Haiwaan is interested in giving its audience an evening at the movies rather than simply delivering a plot.

The film is not without its conventionalities, and some of its dramatic turns belong firmly to the grammar of mainstream cinema. But perhaps that is beside the point. Haiwaan works because it understands that familiarity, when handled with conviction, can be pleasurable. Priyadarshan takes recognisable ingredients and gives them pace, personality and theatrical energy.

And at the centre of it all are Saif Ali Khan and Akshay Kumar, two actors who make the film considerably more compelling than its premise alone might suggest. Khan brings quiet intelligence to a character who could easily have been written as a symbol of vulnerability; Kumar turns his antagonist into a genuinely unnerving presence. Their chemistry is less about camaraderie than confrontation, less about dialogue than the invisible battle of wills taking place whenever they share the screen.

Haiwaan may not be interested in reinventing the thriller. It is doing something arguably more difficult: delivering one with conviction. It is tense without being oppressive, funny without puncturing its suspense, emotional without becoming sentimental, and commercial without apologising for being commercial. In Priyadarshan’s hands, the darkness comes with a mischievous glint in its eye.

And that may be Haiwaan‘s biggest triumph: it remembers that a thriller is supposed to thrill.

**** Four Stars