In the last thirty minutes of an Anurag Kashyap film, the world tears open. This line has lived in cinema longer than memory. And I learnt it by watching him bend it, stretch it, twist it into new forms. Each encounter shaped the phrase afresh: fury in Gangs of Wasseypur, union in Raman Raghav 2.0, grief in Bombay Velvet, aftertaste in Ugly, reckoning in Dev.D. But none of those breaks land with the weight of Nishaanchi 2. Here the collapse isn’t surprise or spectacle; instead, it’s very much a consequence. It is an event foretold by every choice, every crime. So yes, all hell breaks loose, for it falls along the only line it ever could. So yes, only ruin is left at the end, but standing on it is a moral centre. So yes, it’s predictable, but its part of the plan, for melodrama has always been the craft of restoring order. Nishaanchi was always Kashyap’s foray into the cinema of melodrama, his attempt to let Mehboob Khan meet Yash Chopra in the badlands …