Anyone who knows me knows that Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar franchise is far from what I usually choose to watch in theatres. Yet, I pushed aside my general aversion to action spectacles and booked an ultra-expensive ticket for Dhurandhar: The Revenge.

I won’t get into a full review of the blockbuster – not least because negative responses to the film don’t seem to be particularly welcome in certain corners of social media. But one thing felt impossible to ignore: this is a film designed to provoke. Dhurandhar thrives on outrage; it doesn’t matter whether you walk out cheering its narrative or questioning its very existence.

As the credits rolled, my mind drifted to the kind of cinema that had stayed with me over the past year – films that unsettled, moved, and lingered long after the screen went dark. And then, to one I couldn’t watch at all: The Voice of Hind Rajab, an Academy Award-nominated film whose release was halted in India amid concerns over diplomatic sensitivities.

While the two movies are essentially unrelated, belonging to wildly separate genres, the contrast was hard to shake off. A country that can sit through hours of Ranveer Singh’s stylised brutality in a movie where violence is exaggerated, prolonged, and applauded, found itself hesitant before the story of a five-year-old girl, her life reduced to silence riddled by bullets.

It wasn’t just irony. It was something more revealing. Because this isn’t really about two films. It’s about what we as an audience make space for and what we don’t.

From the first few frames of the movie, it was clear to me that Dhurandhar was made to inflame. However, The Voice of Hind Rajab is made to humanise.

One movie thrives on scale, be it the spectacle or the steady escalation of anger. The other rests in intimacy – in the unbearable stillness of a child’s final moments, in the kind of grief that resists dramatisation. They are not similar films; they do not attempt to be. But if placed side by side, they reveal something deeper about the kind of stories that have the space to move freely in this country.

Dhurandhar does not hide what it wants from its audience. It wants a reaction that is loud and immediate. Its world is sharply drawn – as was clear in the graphic sexual assault scene and Major Iqbal’s (played by Arjun Rampal) colourful dialogues for Indian women. One is not meant to sit with these scenes quietly; they are meant to draw a response.

The Voice of Hind Rajab, on the other hand, asks for something far less comfortable. It does not offer the relief of resolution or the clarity of sides. It asks you to listen to a story that is smaller in scale but heavier in consequence. It asks you to confront loss not as spectacle, but as silence.

Perhaps this is where the difference lies.

Outrage is easier to process when it is choreographed. It gives the viewer something to root for and something to reject. Meanwhile, empathy offers no such certainty. It is unsettling and refuses to resolve with ease. This is what makes the contrast harder to ignore. One film amplifies anger and finds space with ease. The other centres grief and struggles to be seen.

The unevenness, at least in India, isn’t new. It only becomes evident when a movie like Dhurandhar smashes the box office.

Over the years, several films have found themselves navigating hesitation before reaching audiences. Projects like Empuraan, Phule, and Homebound have, in different ways, encountered pauses or revisions. Such movies have faced uncertainty often in anticipation of how their themes might be received. These are not identical films, nor do they share the same concerns, but they point to a recurring instinct: to adjust, to soften, to pre-empt discomfort.

The reasoning is often familiar. Certain narratives are seen as sensitive. Certain portrayals are weighed against the possibility of offence. The audience, in these moments, is imagined as something fragile – easily provoked, quick to react, and in need of protection.

However, there is little hesitation when excess comes dressed in flamboyance. In Dhurandhar, violence is not incidental – it is stylised, extended, and at times, overwhelming. Bodies are broken, brutality is foregrounded, and the language that accompanies it is unapologetically abrasive. None of it is diluted.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: what exactly are we trying to protect audiences from?

It is not intensity, it is not discomfort, it most definitely is not violence in its most graphic form. These are often allowed to remain when they fit into the frame of a certain narrative.

What seems to invite caution instead are stories that complicate, that humanise, that refuse to reduce themselves to mere spectacle. Stories that ask for reflection rather than reaction often find themselves negotiated before they are even seen.

The contrast is not just about what is shown. Some films are trusted to be consumed as they are. Others are reshaped in the belief that they might be too much.

The question, then, isn’t what disturbs us – it’s what we choose to soften, and what we allow to remain untouched.

Indian audiences have never been singular in their tastes or their tolerance.

The same audience that embraced Rang De Basanti also carried the emotion of Border. It found resonance in the introspection of Swades and the urgency of Uri: The Surgical Strike. These films differ in tone, politics, and perspective, yet they all found their place – not because they said the same thing, but because they trusted the audience to engage with them.

That range matters. It reminds us that viewers are not as narrowly defined as they are sometimes assumed to be. They are capable of holding contradiction – of responding to both spectacle and subtlety, to both assertion and introspection.

Which is what makes the absence of certain films feel less like a reflection of public sentiment, and more like a narrowing of what is allowed to reach it.

A film like Dhurandhar does not need to be diminished for another to exist. Nor does The Voice of Hind Rajab, which is a quieter, more difficult story, need to be shielded from the public in order to maintain some imagined balance.

Because a country as vast and varied as India does not experience cinema in one way. It never has. The audience is ready. It always has been.

The real question is whether we are willing to trust it enough to let every story be heard.