Kartavya Review: Saif Ali Khan Is Brilliant But the Film Loses Its Own Plot By the Finale

Kartavya

Now streaming on Netflix

Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Sanjay Mishra, Rasika Dugal, Manish Chaudhari, Zakir Hussain, Yudhvir Ahlawat & more

Written & Directed by: Pulkit

Produced by Gauri Khan

Rating - *** (3/5)

It is usually always a delight to see Saif Ali Khan on your screens, no matter the medium or the platform, especially when he is being his most versatile self rather than hunting for precious stones or playing a ten-headed mythological antagonist with a fake beard. Kartavya is no different in that regard. What makes the premise particularly interesting is that writer and director Pulkit collaborates with him here and on paper, this should be a thoroughly engaging pairing given how both these artists are known to dive straight into the teeth of uncomfortable, morally tangled material whenever they choose to take something on.

Does Kartavya actually do that? Mostly yes, occasionally no, and frustratingly, it is the occasions that linger.

A Cop, A Conscience and A World Falling Apart Around Him

SHO Pawan, played by Saif Ali Khan, is navigating what appears to be an ordinary, if perpetually exhausting, life as a police officer until everything begins unravelling simultaneously. A senior journalist under his protection turns up dead. His younger brother lands himself in the middle of a dangerously volatile inter-caste love story that the village would rather see buried than resolved.

And Pawan himself is quietly battling a deeply personal crisis of duty and conscience, fighting demons both literal and metaphorical with equal measures of weariness and stubborn resolve. Orbiting him are his wife Varsha, played by a quietly assured Rasika Dugal, his son Honey played by Swastik Bhagat, his no-nonsense senior Keshav played by Manish Chaudhari, and his endearingly loyal junior and closest friend Ashok, played by Sanjay Mishra, who deserves a paragraph entirely to himself and will get one shortly.

The Cold Open Energy That the Film Promptly Abandons

The film almost slips into a prestige television treatment in the best way imaginable during its opening stretch. If you have consumed enough global series to understand the grammar of the medium, you would recognise the cold open sensibility Pulkit reaches for here, that particular kind of controlled, almost detached introductory sequence that establishes an entire world before the emotional avalanche properly begins.

It is genuinely exciting when it happens. It is only deeply unfortunate that the film nearly entirely abandons this register as it progresses, choosing instead to pile on complications rather than sitting with the weight of the ones it has already introduced.

Pulkit's Directorial Instincts Are Sharp, Even When the Writing Wobbles

Director Pulkit has a demonstrable and rather impressive knack for working with subtle recurring motifs that accumulate meaning almost without the audience noticing. The detail of SHO Pawan's quiet obsession with white shoes, and the way characters gift him the same across multiple points in the narrative, is exactly the kind of specificity that separates a thoughtful director from a merely competent one.

Pulkit is also remarkably skilled at taking material that is genuinely dark, occasionally even gruesome, and presenting it in a way that is emotionally palpable rather than gratuitously oppressive, finding moments of impact without ever tipping into exploitation. These are not small achievements and they deserve to be acknowledged before the film's more significant problems are laid out.

Saif and Sanjay Mishra Are the Best Thing Here, By a Distance

What works considerably further are the casting choices across the board, where every actor appears to inhabit their role with a naturalness that makes the ensemble feel genuinely lived in rather than assembled. The central dynamic between Pawan and Ashok is, on paper, the oldest trick available in the buddy cop manual, a formula that has been deployed across approximately a gazillion films and television shows over the decades. And yet it works beautifully here because of how carefully the relationship has been established and how effortlessly Saif and Sanjay Mishra navigate the unspoken rhythms of it.

Theirs is a friendship built on quiet mutual respect, genuine affection, and a banter that generates some of the film's most effective comic relief without ever feeling forced or inserted purely for tonal contrast. And then there is that moment when Saif's Pawan drily mouths the line about someone watching too many romantic films and turning into Shah Rukh Khan, at which point you chuckle considerably harder than you might otherwise, given that this is a film produced by Gauri Khan and the very well-documented off-screen friendship and warmth between Saif and Shah Rukh is the kind of inside joke that the film earns rather than simply reaching for.

Too Many Themes, Too Little Payoff

Pulkit, with Kartavya, makes the fairly fatal creative error of attempting to weave too many themes and conflicts around a single central spine. Casteism, juvenile delinquency, a murdered journalist, a godman operating as a puppeteer across the entire social ecosystem, and Pawan's own grinding personal and moral dilemmas are all present and all jostling for narrative real estate. There is a common thread that is meant to tie these disparate strands together and it does so intermittently, sometimes holding with real conviction, other times coming completely loose at the seams.

The ethical questions the film poses are genuinely interesting and the morally dubious calls that characters make are written with enough nuance that you understand, at least partially, why they arrive at the decisions they do. But Pulkit also stumbles rather conspicuously over the predictability of his central twist. The moment that is engineered to land as a major revelation announces itself so far in advance that by the time it arrives, the intended impact has already largely deflated.

The Villain Problem Is Impossible to Ignore

The writing also falters in a way that becomes increasingly difficult to set aside, specifically in its handling of Anand Shri, the film's primary antagonist. The character is introduced with considerable menace and an impressively constructed aura of legend and dread, but the film never actually invests in explaining what drives him beyond a certain surface-level establishment of his reputation.

Saurabh Dwivedi, who plays the role, is understandable casting given that the character demands shudh Hindi delivered with a particular kind of quiet menace, and Dwivedi handles that register reasonably well. But there is a visible nervousness to the performance at certain points and more critically, the character is simply abandoned by the screenplay after all that foundational work, never arriving at any direct confrontation or meaningful reckoning with Pawan that would justify the elaborate setup. It is one of the more baffling writerly decisions in recent memory.

The Finale Rushes Past Everything the Film Promised

As Kartavya moves into its final stretch, the underwhelming sensation accumulates with a certain inevitability. The inter-caste conflict, which the film spends considerable time positioning as a ticking bomb directly aimed at Pawan's household and conscience, somehow never actually reaches him in any direct or consequential way despite him being the singular reason for the community's hostility. Conflicts that are carefully introduced across the first two acts are either quietly dropped or resolved with such haste that they leave no actual mark on the story's conclusion.

The gritty, methodical tension of the opening gives way to something increasingly rushed and narratively unsatisfying. Also being genuinely excellent in smaller doses is Yudhvir Ahlawat's Harpal, who manages to carry the requisite innocence of the character without ever tipping into something maudlin or performatively naive. Rasika Dugal, functioning as the film's only significant female presence amid what is otherwise an almost entirely testosterone-driven narrative battleground, brings a composed and grounded warmth to Varsha that the film genuinely needs and would be considerably poorer without.

The Final Word

Saif Ali Khan, as a reminder that needs to be issued periodically, is one of the finest actors this industry has produced and Kartavya is another precise demonstration of exactly that.

The sheer ease with which he inhabits a character who carries a specific regional accent, a particular physical demeanor, and a vulnerability that never once tips into sentimentality is the work of someone who has long since stopped needing to prove anything and simply does it anyway. Kartavya is worth watching for him alone. It is only worth wishing that the film around him had held together as well as he did.