Need for Steed: A Fairytale That Trots When It Has To Gallop

I was quite spoilt for choice when I went looking for equine puns to describe Abhishek Kapoor’s period romance that is the acting debut of Aaman Devgn and Rasha Thadani. So let me get this out of the way: if you’re really craving a mainstream period drama and don’t mind a four-legged lead with a talent for histrionics, don’t say neigh to Azaad.

Govind (Devgn) is a penniless young man in a pre-Independence Indian village where boys are supposed to grow up charmed by, well, horses. The dream Govind harbours is having his own Chetak, the legendary steed of the warrior-king Maharana Pratap. As a stable-hand dreaming beyond his means, he is made to have two tiffs with the local zamindar’s uptight daughter (Thadani). On the first occasion, he receives lashes and on the second, he runs to the hills.

The hills remind me—I don’t know how I feel about a 19-year-old in an objectification pro max item song in 2025. I don’t know if I can digest Ajay Devgn going from a meek plowman to a ferocious sword-fighting vigilante-brigand, all while looking the same no matter the number of years he’s spent in this shocking transformation. The worst part yet is that I can have no more of Piyush Mishra doing whatever he does with his dialogues.

But Azaad is definitely refreshing in one big way. Remember I earlier called it a period romance? It turns out that in this film, it’s not really the kind of meaning of romance that you attach to a sweeping love story between humans. Despite the lead pair getting one swoony ‘oh I’m going to get a fever’ admission of love each, their amateur flirting skills could blossom at best into a respectful friendship. In this film, it is Romance with an R—rebellion, redemption, renegadery. You see it briefly in Ajay Devgn mouthing inaudibly pithy platitudes about revolution being the lover he has taken.

But then you discover that the inevitable-seeming man-woman romance has been dialed down to crank up a weird sort of limerence and tension between human and animal. Out in the ravines, when Govind is being grilled by the brigands, he lays eyes once more on the chief’s prized horse. It is love at first sight—he stalks the black beauty, courts it in the most anthropomorphic ways and yearns hormonally night and day to mount it.

Over and over again, the horse whinnies, agitatedly hoists its front legs to thwart a desperate Govind, bolts away anxiously. The script wants Govind to be excessively deferential to the animal (because has received it from a deceased mentor), but Aaman’s attempts to woo the horse keep falling more and more into the realm of the kind of romance that this film doesn’t seem to be chasing.

Both Aaman and Rasha are star kids and the fact that they come from privileged milieus seems to interfere with their capability to lend full credence to their characterisation. Aaman slips in and out of the Bundeli accent often and Rasha doesn’t seem certain of how broken her character’s English has to be.

I blame the compulsion to force-fit star kids into parts that seem too distanced for comfort from their lived realities. Does it really help soften the blow of nepotism that more and more internet users have started to feel in the past decade or so? The film’s tedium stands out particularly in stretched sequences where attraction between boy and girl is supposed to be brewing. Rasha would need to bring something more to the métier because at many instances her parts seemed more like a theatre fresher faceswapped with Raveena Tandon. Aaman appears awestruck with Azaad the horse and content riding on the coattails of the onscreen machismo of his uncle.

Even more unfortunately, the costume department seems to have caved in before the male population’s need to leer at a nubile teen version of Raveena Tandon. Authenticity would rather dictate that the character’s deeply patriarchal father (Mishra) and brother (Mohit Malik) want the females of their house going in public fully covered.

I didn’t quite know if it was a genuine registering of triumph or sheer adrenaline in the tense final moments of the film that made me feel a frisson of excitement during the race that the plot has been built up for. Like a true Bollywood hero, Aaman is dealt lashes, bullets and kicks from the antagonist. The hero slips off his grievously wounded horse but stylishly turns the tables by quickly leaping up and landing a decisive recoil kick in his nemesis’ face. Purely in cinematic terms, as far as Ajay Devgn’s motorcycle stunt from Phool Aur Kaante (1991) is concerned, this visual is a worthy interim successor of that legacy.

The film seems clearly poised to adopt the magic and flight of a fairytale, and it yet doesn’t fully commit itself to the necessary wonder and optimism of it. You know by and large how things are broadly going to play out—but when the storytelling gets more and more predictable, loss of investment is inevitable. One actually wouldn’t mind Azaad as an Indian version of a Studio Ghibli film because sequences like horses performing coordinated dressage for courtship and drinking country liquor from a bottle unassisted can only belong in surreal suspension of disbelief. Or, the circus.