Haiwaan (2026): Saif’s Blind Avenger Is Undone By A Mute Villain
In a room, blind Shyam Rane identifies a stranger by the scrape of a shoe and the smell of rain on wool, and for one scene the film trusts its premise. Then a judge is murdered, Shyam is named suspect, and the remaining two and a half hours spend that goodwill fast.
Saif Ali Khan Hears The Room, And Haiwaan Briefly Works
Saif plays blind Shyam with a stillness that pays off whenever the film lets his ears do the acting, and the first-half passages mapping sound and scent are the sharpest work he has done in a while. He carries the child-protection sequences with genuine weight, though his scenes with Shriya Pilgaonkar’s Naina stay cool.
The reunion with Akshay Kumar is the film’s entire promise, and Deccan Herald’s verdict that Saif shines “in a very few moments” while Akshay makes no impact is the honest count.
Priyadarshan’s Sound Design Outruns His Own Screenplay
The direction is strongest in setup, where sound becomes geography and Shyam’s slow reading of a room beats every chase staged afterwards. Priyadarshan understands the premise; he simply cannot hold it, and added subplots about abusive husbands and comic sidekicks wear the tension down across 164 minutes.
The Hindu called it “a defanged Priyadarshan thriller, ” and Indian Express filed 2 out of 5, which is roughly where this lands.
The Murder Frame Holds Even As Parshuram Goes Slack
The sensory premise is genuine craft: a blind man reconstructs a crime from what he hears, and the murder framing gives the first hour a spine. Sound is the protagonist’s only map, and almost nothing here is visual-first, which is rarer than it should be.
The pursuit is where it collapses. Parshuram’s killings carry no menace, the police investigation exists to pad the middle, and the second half escalates volume rather than tension. For a crime thriller, that is the wrong arithmetic.
What remains is the child-protection thread and a climax face-off that should land far harder than it does, since two hours have been spent building toward it. The violence stays largely off-screen under that U/A 16+ cut. I kept waiting for one setpiece to justify the runtime.
Boman Irani’s Judge And Saiyami Kher’s Inspector Get Wasted
Boman Irani gives Judge Pradhan a weary authority the rest of the film never matches, and his early scenes anchor the murder that sets everything moving. Saiyami Kher’s Inspector Varsha Joshi is written with sharp sleuthing instincts, then parked in a procedural that lets Shyam do the detecting.
Rajpal Yadav and Sharib Hashmi’s comic relief plays as filler rather than release, and Shriya Pilgaonkar’s subplot about an abusive husband flatlines almost immediately.
Thrillers that hinge on what a character can hear are a narrow, rewarding niche, and our Hindi crime thriller reviews collect the ones that make the sense count.
CBFC’s Trimmed Line And A ₹3 Crore Opening Say The Same Thing
No political storm surrounds Haiwaan, only a censor board that swapped out a derogatory sentence and softened a few words on the way to a U/A 16+ certificate. The verdict arrived at the ticket window instead: roughly ₹3 crore India net on day one and about ₹4 crore worldwide, per Sacnilk figures cited by News18.
Against a ₹100–115 crore budget, IMDb’s 4.8/10 from 10, 172 ratings reads less like an outlier than agreement. Competition from Mirzapur: The Movie and Hanuman Ansh did not help a film that already looked like a flop.
Go only if Saif Ali Khan’s quieter registers are enough for you, and go in a regular theatre seat rather than paying premium prices for a padded 164 minutes. Priyadarshan fans are better off revisiting Oppam, which handled the same premise with a harder edge and a villain who actually arrives. Streaming will be a kinder home for this one.
Readers looking for more hindi thriller reviews can explore them on HDHub.
Where Haiwaan builds a man’s world from what he hears, The Transition interrogates the
Ankit Jaiswal is the Chief Author, covering Indian cinema and OTT releases with honest, no-filler criticism. An SEO strategist by background, he brings a research-driven approach to film writing, cutting through hype to tell you exactly what's worth your time.
