Anubhav Sinha’s ‘Bheed’ delivers a brash reminder of mass suffering, systemic failure

Starring: Rajkummar Rao, Bhumi Pednekar, Pankaj Kapur, Dia Mirza, Kritika Kamra, Ashutosh Rana, and others 

“Sorry, we have run out of all words today.”—read the front-page headline of Mumbai Mirror on May 9, 2020. 

Sixteen migrants walking back to their home from Jalna, Maharashtra, were sleeping on train tracks—exhausted, lost, and abandoned. A goods train ran over them.

This is one of the many ghastly news stories from the COVID-19 pandemic that showed utter systemic failure for migrant labour in India. 

Bheed, by Anubhav Sinha, connects shocking tales of struggle, suffering, abandonment, and survival of India’s vast migrant labour population trudging back home during the lockdown into a fictional tale. 

Shot in black and white—for a stark, shocking visual feel—the film is moving and hard-hitting like a documentary. But it is a somewhat laboured attempt to show how society treats the poorest of our country at a time of global crisis, more argumentative than poignant at times.

Soumik Mukherjee’s (Director of Photography) unrelenting camera captures the plight of migrants (in close up) who walked for thousands of kilometres to get home. 

Displaced overnight, they set out to return to their villages only to find state borders locking them out. Bleeding feet, mewling children, exhausted mothers trashing hungry kids, people hiding in cement mixers, sick elders, and girls struggling with menstrual hygiene—these stark images make their way into a story with multiple characters. 

This multitude of mass strugglers ends up at a police check post in Uttar Pradesh under the charge of diligent young officer Surya Kumar Singh Tikas (Rajkummar Rao)—a young cop duty bound to keep everyone out—also reminded of his predestined place in society because of his caste. 

His girlfriend—Renu Sharma (Bhumi Pednekar)—is a doctor caring for symptomatic patients at the check-post. Subordinate officer Singh Saab (Aditya Shrivastava) won’t follow orders from his superior, albeit from a lower caste. 

A young girl who cycled over unimaginable distances to bring her ailing father home. A privileged, wealthy mother, Madamji (Dia Mirza), has to be kept at bay, despite her tendency to bribe and claim a preset set of privileges amidst mass suffering. 

She has a driver (Sushil Pandey), ferrying Madamji in a Fortuner while managing her multiple efforts to get through the border by any means. Insensitive remarks about the poor having better immunity and references to lactose intolerance reflect the superficiality, marking the affluent in India’s cities, but also feel a bit typecast. 

Setting up these characters and their confrontation with a barely-functioning administration that must impose harsh measures makes the pace plodding in the first half. In fact, a TV journalist (Kritika Kamra) and her cameraman make loaded statements, and Bheed begins to feel like a message film. 

To capture the ensuing chaos and governmental failure, the film’s writers (Sinha, Sonali Jain, and Saumya Tiwari) have created multiple characters, jostling for breathing space in a busy screenplay. 

The suffering of people creates a deliberate claustrophobic impact—to hammer home a humanitarian crisis. But there is little room for most characters to evolve and evoke empathy. 

In the second half of the film, simmering age-old fault lines of caste and religion boil over. As Surya Singh must grapple with prejudice and keep his conscience, his experience becomes the most powerful. 

Rao establishes himself as one of the best actors. Pankaj Kapur as Trivedi Babu, a bigoted watchman that has to save his sick brother and fellow travellers in a bus, delivers a brilliant performance. His inherent biased reactions and the underlying pathos of his situation are nuanced in a story with limited character development.  

As the plot goes beyond dramatic resolution and stays on point, the film reiterates the poor are vulnerable and uncared for, as no one accounts for them while planning. Since there are so many characters in play, some, like Dia Mirza’s and Ashutosh Rana’s, are limited in scope. 

Bheed has tried to conflate the experience of migrant labour during COVID-19 to the experience of India’s Partition (1947), which feels affected and argumentative. 

Having said that, Sinha’s conscious attempt to tell a story of India’s recent lived experience beyond government narratives is bold and laudatory. Bheed is a watch for those who want to look beyond the rhetoric. 

Rating: 4/5