3 min readSep 11, 2026 12:10 PM IST
Haiwaan movie review: The film stars Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan in the lead roles.Haiwaan movie review: Haiwaan vs Insaan, monster vs human, that age-old conflict in the movies, gets a refresh in Haiwaan, with Priyadarshan re-upping his own 2016 Malayalam hit Oppam. Here Saif Ali Khan plays the sightless Shyam, up against Akshay Kumar’s murderous Parshuram, in a film which stays largely faithful to the original.
In Priyan’s world protagonists and antagonists are always arrayed in black and white, with lashes of heavy-handed humour thrown in. The mix works in some of his movies, mostly his loud comedies in which the cast is tasked with delivering dialogues when not hanging off cliffs: Haiwaan is the usual mix of genres in Priyadarshan’s films, in which tonal switches abound, the first half setting up the premise of an innocent man being imprisoned for a crime he didn’t do, and the second turning into an unintentional comic police procedural.