(Spoiler alert) Before that, as if under the impression that the viewer is ignorant of the mechanics of rape, the camera moves down a child’s body to ensure that we see the blood on the part of her dress between her legs after we are already aware that she has been brutalised. It is hard to watch, but not infuriating like the presence in the script of a Ravish Kumar-like journalist (Rajesh Tailang) who obliquely justifies mob justice and, thereby, Sameer’s actions while speaking on his television channel. Scissors stabbing stomachs, sharp metal running slowly across a neck, the camera moving up close as a fellow’s face is smashed into a wall and then dragged across its rough surface leaving a trail of red wetness in its wake, guns, knives, fists – KH2 leaves no stone unturned to highlight the bloody havoc Sameer wreaks. The location shifts, the sun rises and sets, the weather changes, but one thing remains constant: the in-your-face gore accompanied by a raucous soundtrack and unpleasant sound design.

They kill at night in the fields of Uttar Pradesh, they kill in a filthy prison on a rainy day, they kill in a butcher’s establishment on Moharram, they kill amidst the Pyramids of Giza. KH2 travels from India all the way to Egypt, as Sameer and his cohorts commit murder after murder.

(Aside: much later in the film, the Hapless Maiden makes what I assume Faruk thought is a feminist assertion, but the course correction comes too late and is too slight, Kind Sir.) As if it is not bad enough that such a regressive conversation found space in this script, writer-director Faruk Kabir does one worse by making lesbianism an aspect of the lead villain’s villainy. Read: the Hapless Maiden challenges the Knight. That hope fades in the first half following a gruesome double rape in KH2 – or should I be referring to it as KHC2AP? – and Nargis leaves Sameer, telling him she will return only after he avenges those crimes. So in 2022, when the curtain rises on KH2 with the spotlight on Nargis’ emotions and trauma, there’s a glimmer of hope that this sequel will make amends for the mistakes of KH1. The writing of Nargis and of the Sameer-Nargis relationship in that film was as thin as a potato wafer. While it was good to see Muscle Man Jammwal trying to explore a character’s gentler side in KH1, the unfortunate truth is that like so many mainstream Indian films about a woman in distress, this one too was focused entirely on the man who sets out to save her and marginalised the woman herself. Those who saw Khuda Haafiz in 2020 will recall how in that chapter, Nargis was abducted and repeatedly raped in a fictional Gulf country called Noman, and Sameer went on a rampage to rescue her. When Khuda Haafiz: Chapter II – Agni Pariksha opens, Sameer ( Vidyut Jammwal) and his wife Nargis ( Shivaleeka Oberoi) are in her therapist’s room.

Khuda haafiz google drive