Andhadhun ( ) is a 2018 Indian Hindi-language black comedy crime thriller film co-written and directed by Sriram Raghavan. It stars Tabu, Ayushmann Khurrana, Radhika Apte and Anil Dhawan. The film tells the story of a blind piano player who unwittingly becomes embroiled in the murder of a retired actor.
The script of Andhadhun was written by Raghavan, Arijit Biswas, Pooja Ladha Surti, Yogesh Chandekar and Hemanth M. Rao. The film was edited by Surti, and K. U. Mohanan was its director of photography. Amit Trivedi composed songs for the film and Jaideep Sahni wrote the lyrics; Raftaar and Girish Nakod co-wrote the title song as guest composers, while Daniel B. George composed the background score. The film was shot in Pune in 44 days spread over more than a year; principal photography began in June 2017 and ended on 17 July 2018.
Andhadhun was released by Viacom18 Motion Pictures theatrically in India on 5 October 2018 to widespread critical acclaim. It won four awards, including Best Director and Best Screenplay, at the Screen Awards ceremony and five Filmfare Awards, including Best Film (Critics) and Best Actor (Critics) for Khurrana. It also won three National Film Awards: Best Feature Film in Hindi, Best Actor for Khurrana, and Best Screenplay. Grossing over at the worldwide box office, it became the fourth highest-grossing Indian film of 2018, and was remade in Telugu as Maestro (2021), in Malayalam as Bhramam (2021) and in Tamil as Andhagan (2024).
Plot Akash Saraf is a Pune-based pianist who feigns visual impairment as an artistic experiment to refine his musical focus. While navigating a street, he is knocked over by a young woman named Sophie. Impressed by his apparent musical talent, Sophie secures him a regular engagement at her father's diner. Although Akash initially utilizes opaque contact lenses during his practice sessions, his growing affection for Sophie prompts him to discard them, choosing instead to simply simulate blindness. The two soon begin a romantic relationship. At the diner, Pramod Sinha, a wealthy, retired actor, notices Akash's skill and hires him for a private performance at his apartment to celebrate his wedding anniversary.
When Akash arrives at the residence, Pramod's wife, Simi, reluctantly lets him in to avoid arousing the suspicion of a nosy neighbor. Upon entering, Akash immediately discovers Pramod's corpse on the floor. Forced to maintain his facade of blindness to protect his life, Akash continues to play the piano while feigning absolute ignorance. He watches as Simi and her hidden paramour—Manohar, a muscular police inspector—clean the crime scene and stuff the body into a suitcase. Disturbed by the ordeal, Akash leaves the building and encounters Sakhu, a lottery ticket seller with a distinctive Lord Shiva tattoo, who helps him hail an auto-rickshaw driven by a man named Murli.
Akash attempts to report the homicide at the local precinct, but he aborts the mission upon discovering that Manohar is the inspector in charge of the station. He quickly improvises a false report about a missing pet cat to escape. Meanwhile, an elderly neighbor, Mrs. D'Sa, informs the police that she witnessed an unfamiliar man entering the Sinhas' apartment on the day of the murder. To silence her, Simi pushes Mrs. D'Sa off the building's ledge. Akash arrives for a scheduled piano lesson just in time to witness the fatal fall, but he is forced to continue his blind act. Soon after, a skeptical neighborhood child surreptitiously records a video of Akash exercising full visual awareness.
Simi visits Akash's apartment under the guise of offering temple sweets, which she has laced with a potent drug. After exposing his fraud by catching him off guard, she blinds him with a chemical solution and drugs him into unconsciousness. While Akash is incapacitated, the neighbor's child exposes the video to Sophie. Sophie rushes to the apartment, but Simi deftly manipulates the scene to make it appear as though she and Akash are having an affair, causing a heartbroken Sophie to abandon him. Manohar later infiltrates the apartment to eliminate Akash, but the newly blinded pianist narrowly escapes, knocking himself unconscious against a telephone pole during his flight.
Akash awakens in an illicit organ-harvesting clinic managed by a corrupt doctor, Dr. Swami, and his assistants, who happen to be Murli and Sakhu. When Akash mentions Sakhu's specific tattoo—which he noted before losing his sight—the trio realizes he was not originally blind and decides to spare him. Akash proposes a lucrative blackmail scheme involving Simi's complicity in the murder. They kidnap Simi, fabricate a suicide note, and demand a massive ransom from Manohar. However, Murli and Sakhu double-cross Akash, binding him alongside Simi to claim the entire payout for themselves. The extortion plot collapses when Manohar ambushes the drop-off point, shooting Murli before accidentally killing himself inside a malfunctioning elevator. Furthermore, the ransom money is revealed to be counterfeit.
Simi assists Akash in freeing himself from his bonds. However, once her blindfold is removed, she betrays him and mounts a violent attack. Dr. Swami intervenes, helping Akash subdue Simi. They lock her in the trunk of a vehicle and drive toward Mumbai, where Swami plans to harvest Simi's organs for a wealthy client and use her corneas to restore Akash's vision. When Simi regains consciousness, she breaks into the cabin, overpowers Swami, and takes control of the vehicle. Akash, unaware that Swami has been incapacitated, continues to plead for Simi's release.
Two years later, Sophie encounters Akash performing at a high-end gig in Kraków, Poland. Akash narrates the entire sequence of events to her, claiming that after Swami was neutralized, Simi ejected him from the vehicle and attempted to run him over. However, a stray hare struck her windshield, causing her to lose control of the car, which crashed and burst into flames. Sophie comforts him, noting that he should have accepted the doctor's offer to harvest her corneas. As Akash walks away, he uses his cane to cleanly strike a beverage can out of his path, strongly implying that his vision was restored using Simi's corneas and that his current blindness is yet another facade.
Cast
The cast is listed below: Tabu as Simi Sinha Ayushmann Khurrana as Akash Sarraf Radhika Apte as Sophie Anil Dhawan as Pramod Sinha Zakir Hussain as Dr. Krishna Swami Ashwini Kalsekar as Rasika Jawanda Manav Vij as Inspector Manohar Jawanda Chhaya Kadam as Sakhu Pawan Singh as Murli Mohini Kewalramani as Mrs. D'SA Gopal K. Singh as Sub-Inspector Paresh Kadam Rashmi Agdekar as Daani Sinha Kabir Sajid Sheikh as Bandu Rudrangshu Chakrabarti as Murli Pratik Nandkumar More as Surya Mahesh Rale as P. Kamdar Abhishek Shukla as Animal Hunter Jaydutt Vyas as Alurkar Girdhar Swami
Production Development Director-writer Sriram Raghavan saw (The Piano Tuner), a 2010 French short film about a blind pianist, in 2013 at the recommendation of his friend, filmmaker Hemanth M Rao. Raghavan said although his film is different, the French film was its "basic germ". He wanted Rao to write a script based on the short but Rao was directing a film of his own. Raghavan then worked on Badlapur (2015) and had the "gist of the story". After reading about Kaabil, which is also about a blind man, he was about to start writing but stopped, thinking having two films about blind people would be "crazy". Raghavan later resumed the script, taking a different approach.
The idea of a blind pianist performing while a body is being dumped and a crime scene cleaned up fascinated Raghavan, who had written a similar scene for his previous film, Agent Vinod (2012), in which a blind girl plays the piano while surrounded by mayhem. Raghavan wrote the script with Arijit Biswas, Yogesh Chandekar, Rao and Pooja Ladha Surti. He gave the story idea to Varun Dhawan while they were working on Badlapur but Dhawan became busy with other films and the script was left unfinished. Negotiations with Suriya and Harshvardhan Kapoor also fell through. Raghavan discussed the scenes with the writers, who reacted as viewers.
Raghavan and Biswas were unhappy while translating the dialogue from English to Hindi because they thought in English. Raghavan told Biswas to write the dramatic dialogue in Bengali, which was "at least the Indian idiom". Surti wrote another version of the dialogue because her Hindi was better than that of the others. Raghavan cited the 1996 film Fargo and the eponymous television series as an inspiration, calling them "realistic and yet ... bizarre". One of his friends was in a situation similar to one in the film; he then realised old Hindi films use "piano songs" and decided make the blind pianist the main character.
Casting Ayushmann Khurrana heard about the film from casting directors Mukesh Chhabra and Girdhar Swami. He contacted Raghavan, expressing interest in working on it. Raghavan conducted screen tests of the scene in which the protagonist wakes up blind: "There were two pieces – when you are acting blind and when you are actually blind, and we tried both. I wanted to see what the difference in his body language would be." Khurrana, who played the piano in the film, met several blind students and observed "how [a blind pianist] plays, conducts and moves his hands". Khurrana studied piano for four hours daily under Akshay Verma, a pianist based in Los Angeles, and did not use a body double in the film. He called it the "most challenging role" of his career. Khurrana was also trained by visually impaired musician Rahul Gajjal as part of the film.
Raghavan told Khurrana not to watch films with a blind protagonist and took him to the National School of the Blind. He said, "Since no two persons are the same, I picked up the nuances, learnt how to hold the stick and climb the stairs". Khurrana made omelettes and walked on the street blindfolded. He was given a pair of special lenses that impaired his vision by around 80 percent. His body language changed because he could no longer see properly. After wearing the black glasses, his vision was affected by 90 percent and he shot the entire film like that. Raghavan called Radhika Apte, who agreed to play Khurrana's love interest. Several scenes were improvised. Tabu was Raghavan's first choice for Simi. He did not brief her about scenes and they "kept developing [the character] as it went". Anil Dhawan played a former actor, a version of himself.
Raghavan said he wanted to make a "fun sort of thriller" to follow Badlapur. According to him, Andhadhun is not a whodunit; " ... The audience knows all along what's happening and why. It's the characters who don't." Raghavan and the film's director of photography K. U. Mohanan decided to "restrict everything to Akash's point of view" so the audience could see what Akash sees. There were no close-ups in the piano-playing scene, which was extensively rehearsed with several assistants to fit its timing into the four-minute piano piece. It was not rehearsed with the actors; Raghavan told them to "just do the scene" and gave them a time frame; "We didn't want it to look practiced; we needed that uncertainty". The film's first shot was rehearsed with Khurrana for three months. Raghavan called Andhadhun "a fun film in the macabre sense of the word", with moments of "wickedness and brutality".