O Romeo review: A Vishal Bhardwaj coded film that misses his Shakespearean touch!

In returning to the roots of the gangster drama and the tragic love story, the film feels caught between legacy and modernity, as Bhardwaj’s signature shadows constantly tussle with the new-age wave of cinema!

These days, masculinity that is loud, blood-soaked and endlessly performative has taken over our screens. So when VishalBhardwaj announced a gangster drama rooted in real-life underworld lore, filtered through Shakespeare, and reuniting with ShahidKapoor, it felt less like a film announcement and more like an opportunity for an OG filmmaker to reclaim masculinity in its most honest and layered form. The expectations were sky-high. After all, when Bhardwaj revisits crime and Kapoor steps into moral madness, history tells us something iconic is about to unfold. And yet, O'Romeo ends up being a return that almost touches greatness but never quite claims it. You can see the Bhardwaj film in it, but you don’t always feel it. It’s as if someone meticulously recreated his style without fully capturing his instinct.

Like Gangubai Kathiawadi, which adapted a chapter from S. Hussain Zaidi’s book to craft a woman’s saga of defiance, this film draws from the story of Sapna Didi, a woman who refused to remain a footnote in a gangster’s world and allegedly plotted revenge against Dawood Ibrahim with the help of his rival, Hussain Ustara.Bhardwaj takes that skeletal history and runs it through the tragic pulse of Romeo and Juliet. Though only the thematic beating heart. The result is that we get a story where revenge is romanticized. Ustara (Shahid Kapoor), a meticulously crafty gangster who is often found with sex workers and works as a fixer for the Mumbai police, particularly Ismail Khan (Nana Patekar) has his life turned upside down as Afsha Qureshi (Triptii Dimri) walks into it. And what begins as proximity slowly becomes the transformation of a killing machine into a human being.

Also Read: Tu Yaa Main review: A croc serves real lessons in this gen-z styled love-life drama!

What has always set a Bhardwaj gangster apart is that violence is never just spectacle, it is like psychological weather. He explores it through as inherently internalized as it is externalized as here too, Ustara isn’t merely a man who kills. He is someone eroded by the cost of killing who understands the emotional tax violence extracts. So when he meets Afsha, she isn’t simply a romantic catalyst, in fact, her trauma and brokenness mirrors his own fractures. And then their connection isn’t built on flirtation but on recognition. As Ustara doesn’t fall for Afsha as much as aches to hold on to her innocence, to go back to that naive ruhh that once was alive in him. In that sense, O' Romeo is less about romance and more about a damaged grieving heart craving to find the lost soul, something that was lost a long time ago.

Cinematically too, the film aches to bring back that bygone era as that old-school film textures are there. And in true Bhardwaj fashion, the gullies of Mumbai and even the stylized detours abroad are not mere backdrops but emotional landscapes. The ensemble cast, much like in his previous films, carries a familiar weight as intriguing characters with the policeman that sings to gangsters who move like a band of brothers rather than a one-man army. Faces like Nana Patekar and Farida Jalal bring in nostalgia as Patekar lends his cop a lived-in genuinity while Jalal embodies that reassuring maternal presence. Triptii Dimri too is staged in a way that occasionally echoes the haunted women of Bhardwaj’s earlier films as she carries Afsha’s duality of strength and vulnerability with sincerity. And then there is Shahid Kapoor. No one unravels him quite like Bhardwaj. In his hands, Kapoor’s rage is never empty posturing; it feels rooted in something broken. His Ustara laughs or cries too easily, kills too swiftly, and yet carries the eyes of someone who knows the damage he is inflicting. Kapoor commits fully, finding flashes of vulnerability beneath the swagger. He is magnetic, might I say, often dangerously so.

But here’s where the film falters as it feels like it’s trying a little too hard. The chemistry strains at moments. The madness feels slightly performed rather than inhabited. For every scene that bears Bhardwaj’s poetic weight, there’s another that seems engineered to appease a more mainstream appetite. The biggest bearer of that is Avinash Tiwary’sJalal, designed with his bluish eyes and that haircut as a formidable presence but ends up more louder than menacing. And though Tiwary does search for nuance within the bombast, he is still more brawny than scary. And then there is another proof of pulling for spectacle with the action sequences that are slick and choreographed with flair, almost as if Bhardwaj is consciously engaging with contemporary cinematic grammar that is fashioned in being faster, flashier, and more stylized.

Now you can choose to see this as evolution like a filmmaker adapting without entirely surrendering his voice. There are still moments where his craft cuts through even in action, where metaphor and mood briefly overpower machismo. Something that can be a lesson to new age filmmakers on meeting modern expectations without selling the soul of storytelling. But if you measure O' Romeo against the standard Bhardwaj himself set with films like Maqbool, Omkara, and Haider, the compromise becomes more visible. Those films didn’t just adapt literature; they conversed with it. They weren’t afraid of silence, moral ambiguity, political consciousness or emotional ruin. In contrast here, the balance tilts more toward the physicality of it all, especially violence than the human wreckage it leaves behind. The film entertains in the moment, but it doesn’t linger the way his finest work does.

And yet, perhaps out of love for Bhardwaj’s cinema, I choose to see this as a filmmaker negotiating with the present, trying to hold onto his soul while speaking the language of today. Even if the Midas touch flickers instead of blazing, there are still enough embers here to remind you why his cinema once felt untouchable! 

O' Romeo is currently in theatres near you!