Vishal Bhardwaj makes films that are not quite like anything else in Hindi cinema. They are literary and cinematic simultaneously — adapted from source material (here, Amar Bhushan's novel Escape to Nowhere) with a fidelity to mood rather than plot, which is the only kind of adaptation fidelity that matters. Khufiya is a spy film, technically. But its real subject is the cost of inhabiting two lives at once.
Tabu plays Krishna Mehra, a RAW operative whose cover requires her to become another woman entirely — and who, over time, finds that the boundary between cover and self has become porous. This is not a new premise for the espionage genre. What is new, or at least rare, is the film's refusal to make the professional and personal conflict a source of thriller mechanics. The conflict is interior. The film is patient with it.
Tabu gives one of her finest performances — which is saying something, given that she has been giving finest performances for thirty years. There is a scene in a hotel room, late in the film, where everything she has held back arrives at once. It is the kind of acting that makes you briefly forget you are watching a film. Ali Fazal matches her. Wamiqa Gabbi, in a smaller role, is a revelation.
Bhardwaj's Delhi is specific and atmospheric — not the Delhi of tourist brochures or Bollywood fantasy, but the Delhi of government corridors and South Extension apartments and the particular anxiety of a city that knows it is being watched.
One of the finest Hindi films of the year. Quietly, without announcement.