Haq review: Yami Gautam and Emraan Hashmi deliver impactful performances in a gripping fight for equality

With a strong screenplay and whistle worthy dialogues, Haq is a story that slowly and steadily earns your respect in the course of its two hours!

Haq review: The word ‘Haq’ (right) has such a powerful meaning, especially when you stand up for yourself and take what’s yours. Suparn Varma’sHaq is not your quintessential 'courtroom drama meets melodrama' which preaches us something at the top of its voice. It’s subtle, authentic and yet it shakes you up in ways you wouldn’t expect. It's the story of an ordinary woman who goes to extraordinary lengths to demand justice and the basic respect her husband refused to give her. 

Inspired by the historic Shah Bano case that shook the country back in the 80s, the story revolves around Shazia Bano (Yami Gautam), a naive woman who falls in love with an established lawyer, Abbas Khan(Emraan Hashmi). The story starts with her living the dream to that dream slowly tearing apart and seeing her husband for who he really is. A man who hid behind religion to avoid accountability. He brings himself a second wife, expects her to accept this new life overnight, refuses child support when she storms off and abuses the triple talaq. Thus begins a battle for equality in a system that is built for men. Shazia fights for her right to child support and demands that her husband cannot weaponize and misinterpret religion to keep his ego intact and the tiff between the two gets nastier over the years.

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A movie like this can go wrong in a hundred different ways in today’s socio-political climate. But without any preachy dialogues, Haq shows us Shah Bano’s case exactly how it happened. It focuses only and only on her journey, her turmoil and not the nation’s reaction to it at that point. It also does not blame the religion for it, in fact it blames the people who refuse to understand the real meaning of it and half heartedly, through versus and their interpretation of it, justify patriarchy and keeping women suppressed in the shadows. It is daunting to watch this as a viewer and it's heartbreaking to watch it as a woman. It's scary not because her world changed upside down all of a sudden, but because of how normalized it is in our society. 

Emraan Hashmi and Yami Gautam’s performances are rather impactful in this one! Hashmi as Abbas Khan is cruel, arrogant and so entitled that he refuses to see the harm his decisions cause. Yami Gautam as Shazia Bano has a trajectory of her own. She starts off as a young girl in love, to a heartbroken wife, to a mother who stands tall and sternly asks the world to respect her back. Both of their monologues at the end are delivered with such conviction and are probably the film's finest moments. Sheeba Chaddha as Bela Jain adds nuance to the courtroom scenes as Shazia’s lawyer. Vartika Singh, as Saira, seamlessly fits into the part of the other woman. But what I also like here is the treatment of her character. She isn’t villainized as the ‘second wife’, who plans and plots against the first one - she is empathetic when she needs to be. 

Haq invests you in its story and makes you root for the protagonist to get what she wants. Above everything, it shows you what standing up for yourself, even when the entire world asks you to back down, can get you. It dares to tell a story that many would want to hush even today and opens your eyes about a lot of things you might not be privy to in the process of that!

Haq is currently playing at a theatre near you!

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