A hapless maid in Kabir Singh breaks a water glass by mistake. Our protagonist chases her, glare in place, and cigarette hanging from his lips. When an entire theatre erupts in applause to this man chasing his maid, with the intention of beating her up, you realise Kabir Singh will be a hit. No matter how many reviews try to pry open the eyes of the filmmaker, Sandeep Reddy Vanga, and its lead actor, Shahid Kapoor. It did not happen with Arjun Reddy the film. It will not happen with Kabir Singh. The women in Kabir Singh are beaten, kissed without consent, forced to take off their pants at knifepoint, slapped and treated like street dogs. Kabir Singh's dog gets a meatier role and better treatment than his women in this mess of a film. What worked with Arjun Reddy is a little too much for the Bollywood audience to take. Did director Sandeep Reddy Vanga think he would get away with this level of misogyny a second time? Maybe he did. And he wasn't wrong. The answer lies in that theatre, where 90 per cent of the audience claps when a man sets out to beat a woman, even as the other 10 per cent squirms in discomfort.
Kabir Singh is about an uber-masculine, testosterone-driven person. But take it from someone who has walked out of a toxic, abusive relationship. There is nothing 'cool' about it. The 'manly' men in these relationships don't deserve the end that these films pander to us.
Through the three-hour film - 2 hours and 54 minutes, we see a Solar System that has Medical Student, and then Surgeon Kabir Singh as its resident star. He is one of your Biology projects. Everyone around our hero has only him to worry about. They go to their clinics and 'refer' women to Kabir to sleep with. They keep a count of the days he has been out of home for. They leave him, but only for everything else to fit perfectly back in the scheme of things.
Kabir chooses Preeti's 'friend' for her. His exact words are "You're a good-looking chick, she is a healthy chick. Good combination." And he has just begun. Over the next 2.5 hours, director Sandeep Reddy and actor Shahid Kapoor take us through the absolute worst of toxic masculinity. If you groan in disgust at what is going on in front of you, you are supposed to forgive Kabir Singh as the guy who has 'anger management issues'.
Kabir keeps lamenting that 'it is 2019, but we cannot get married because of caste'. It is 2019. A lot of the people associated with this film seem to have forgotten that.
Among the redeeming factors of Kabir Singh is the acting by an actor Soham who plays Kabir's unrequited best friend Shiva and the sole voice of reason in this film. The supporting cast in Kabir Singh has very little to do except cater to this man's whims and fancies. Kabir Singh spends 120 minutes of its 154 in showing Kabir either drinking or drunk or snorting cocaine or needling in morphine or fighting with people or, slapping his girlfriend or screaming at her.
Misogyny is not cool. Neither is Kabir Singh.