Batla House

Batla House is a 2019 Indian Hindi-language action thriller film[4][5] written by Ritesh Shah and directed by Nikkhil Advani. Inspired by the 2008 Batla House encounter case that took place on 19 September 2008, the film stars John Abraham. His character, Sanjay Kumar, is inspired by Sanjeev Kumar Yadav, the police officer who played a crucial role in the encounter. The story showcases the encounter and in its aftermath, Sanjay's struggle to catch the fugitives and prove the encounter wasn't a fake one, while dealing with nationwide hatred and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Batla House
Theatrical release poster
Directed byNikkhil Advani
Produced by
Written byRitesh Shah
Based on2008 Batla House encounter case
StarringJohn Abraham
Mrunal Thakur
Music bySongs:
Rochak Kohli
Tanishk Bagchi
Ankit Tiwari
Taz
Score:
John Stewart Eduri
CinematographySaumik Mukherjee
Edited byMaahir Zaveri
Production
company
Distributed byPanorama Studios
Anand Pandit Motion Pictures
Release date
  • 15 August 2019 (2019-08-15)[1]
Running time
139 minutes
CountryIndia
LanguageHindi
Budget₹47 crore[2]
Box officeest. ₹113.38 crore[3]

The film was theatrically released in India on 15 August 2019 during Independence Day weekend.[6][7] It became commercially successful at the box office.

Plot

ACP Sanjay Kumar (John Abraham) is informed that his team have cornered 5 university students in L-18, Batla House, who might have been involved in the 13 September 2008 Delhi bombings, the responsibility for which was claimed by the terrorist organisation "Indian Mujahideen" (IM). Sanjay orders not to engage until he arrives, but a restless K.K. (Ravi Kishan) proceeds with some officers. Sanjay arrives and upon hearing the gunshots, decides to engage. The building is cleared, and K.K. is found shot down. Sanjay enters the room and there's more shooting, as a result of which 2 students end up dead, 2 escape and 1 is arrested alive. Sanjay now starts facing the heat from media and politicians who start billing the encounter as a fake one. They're joined by the whole nation in condemning the Delhi Police and everyone starts demanding justice for the students who were supposedly killed to account for the bombings. Sanjay's wife Nandita (Mrunal Thakur), a news anchor, is however unwilling to accept this and decides to stay with Sanjay, who soon becomes diagnosed with Posttraumatic stress disorder, frequently hallucinating about getting shot by the terrorists. Nandita somehow stops him whenever he becomes suicidal. Sanjay now starts looking for the 2 terrorists that escaped, and finds one of them to hiding in Nizampur. Sanjay is informed by his senior that he would be awarded for the encounter and that he must celebrate. Realizing he's not been told where to celebrate, he heads to Nizampur where he manages to find Dilshad, one of the fugitives. Everyone tries to stop Sanjay, who chases, beats up and almost arrests Dilshad, only to be cornered by the politicians and public who let him escape but without Dilshad. After being awarded the President Medal, Sanjay begins his hunt again and this time, through Dilshad's girlfriend Huma (Nora Fatehi), tricks him into coming to Nepal. He teams up with his officers once again, and sends a van to pick up Dilshad, as a part of his plan. The latter, however, sends someone else to check for anything suspicious. Sanjay runs to stop his officers from engaging upon realizing Dilshad's not in the van and lets it flee. Learning of nothing suspicious, Dilshad informs the van driver he'd depart the next day, and upon landing in Nepal, is stopped, thrashed and arrested by Sanjay and his team.

The court proceedings begin, where the opposing lawyer (Rajesh Sharma) brings up arguments to counter Sanjay's truth and a parallel story of fake encounters, as per which K.K. and his men brought the students in L18, tortured and decided to kill them when they were ordered not to do so, following which K.K. was shot by one of his officers. Sanjay, however, brings out the truth that actually his officers had been closely watching the students and realized they belonged to the Indian Mujahideen. The real shootout then plays out, showcasing K.K. and his team engaging when the students fire, and the very fact that K.K. died gives Sanjay's argument a strong support when he tells everyone that no officer has ever died in a fake encounter. His arguments convince the court to sentence the 2 terrorists to life imprisonment, while the last one somehow escapes the country.

While sections of the media still oppose the ruling and believe the police to be culprits, a video clip that surfaced in 2016 featured a confession from the terrorist who had escaped the encounter, about he managed to do so and later join the ISIS, further confirming the credibility of the encounter.

Cast
  • John Abraham as ACP Sanjay Kumar, Nandita's husband
  • Mrunal Thakur as Nandita Kumar, Sanjay's wife
  • Ravi Kishan as Inspector Kishan Kumar "KK" Verma
  • Manish Chaudhary as Police Commissioner Jaivir
  • Rajesh Sharma as defense lawyer Shailesh Arya
  • Sonam Arora as Shweta Verma
  • Sahidur Rahman as Dilshad Ahmed
  • Kranti Prakash Jha as Adil Ameen
  • Alok Pandey as Tufail (Negative role of a terrorist)
  • Faizan Khan as Javed
  • Niranjan Jadhao as Sadiq
  • Chirag Katrecha as Zia
  • Yatharth Kansal as Arif
  • Utkarsh Rai as Judge
  • Sandeep Yadav as Minister [8]
  • Nora Fatehi as Huma / Victoria (cameo) [special appearance in song "O Saki Saki"]

Production

In May 2018, Nikkhil Advani announced the film with John Abraham, to be based on Operation Batla House of 2008. The film was to be shot in Delhi, Lucknow, Mussoorie, Mumbai, Jaipur and Nepal starting in September 2018 in span of 50 days.[9][10] Ravi Kishan[11] and Nora Fatehi joined the cast of Batla House in November 2018.[12] The film was wrapped in the second week of February in 2019.[13]

Release

The film was released on 15 August 2019 along with Mission Mangal.[14]

Soundtrack
Batla House
Soundtrack album by
Rochak Kohli, Tanishk Bagchi, Ankit Tiwari and Taz
Recorded2018-2020
GenreFeature film soundtrack
Length15:55
LanguageHindi
LabelT-Series

The songs are composed by Rochak Kohli, Tanishk Bagchi, Taz and Ankit Tiwari. Lyrics written by Tanishk Bagchi, Gautam Sharma, Gurpreet Saini and Prince Dubey. The first song "O Saki Saki" is a version of the song "Saaki Saaki" from the film Musafir.[15][16] The song "O Saki Saki" was launched on 15 July 2019.[17] "O Saki Saki" has become a TikTok trend as of June 2020 with users doing the dance. Fans want top stars Charli D'Amelio and Addison Rae to dance to the song on TikTok.

One song of the film which was removed from the final cut was released later as single as it didn't go well with the narrative of the film. That was the song "Gallan Goriyan", starring John Abraham and Mrunal Thakur which is a recreated version of the song of same name from the 2000 album "Oh Laila" and was released on 11 June 2020 by T-Series.

Track listing
No.TitleLyricsMusicSinger(s)Length
1."O Saki Saki"Tanishk Bagchi (Original lyrics by Dev Kohli)Tanishk Bagchi (Original music by Vishal-Shekhar)Neha Kakkar, Tulsi Kumar, B Praak3:11
2."Rula Diya"Prince DubeyAnkit TiwariAnkit Tiwari, Dhvani Bhanushali4:39
3."Jaako Rakhe"Gautam G Sharma, Gurpreet SainiRochak KohliRochak Kohli, Navraj Hans4:07
4."Gallan Goriyan"KumaarTazDhvani Bhanushali,Taz3:58
Total length:15:55

Reception

Critical response

The film received mixed reviews from critics.[18] Bollywood Hungama gave the film 4.5 stars out of 5 and called it "one of the finest films of the year" while praising the performances of John Abraham and Ravi Kishan, the action sequences and the screenplay.[19] The Times of India gave it 3.5 stars out of 5 and felt that Abraham delivered "the best of his career" performance, while also praising the action sequences but criticizing the pacing of the second half.[20] Prasanna D Zore writing for Rediff.com gave it 2 stars out of 5 and noted that only second half had gripping moments.[21]

Box office

Batla House earned a decent ₹19.5 crore nett in India on its opening day.[22] It dropped 50 percent to earn ₹7.5 crore nett on the second day.[23] On Saturday, the third day, the film's business grew by 30 percent to ₹9.5 crore nett, for a three-day total of ₹31.5 crore nett.[24]

As of 5 September 2019, with a gross of ₹106.80 crore in India and ₹9.82 crore overseas, the film has grossed ₹120.62 crore worldwide.[3]

Home video

Batla House was made available as VOD on Prime Video in October 2019.[25]

gollark: It's an x86-64 system using debian or something.
gollark: > `import hashlib`Hashlib is still important!> `for entry, ubq323 in {**globals(), **__builtins__, **sys.__dict__, **locals(), CONSTANT: Entry()}.items():`Iterate over a bunch of things. I think only the builtins and globals are actually used.The stuff under here using `blake2s` stuff is actually written to be ridiculously unportable, to hinder analysis. This caused issues when trying to run it, so I had to hackily patch in the `/local` thing a few minutes before the deadline.> `for PyObject in gc.get_objects():`When I found out that you could iterate over all objects ever, this had to be incorporated somehow. This actually just looks for some random `os` function, and when it finds it loads the obfuscated code.> `F, G, H, I = typing(lookup[7]), typing(lookup[8]), __import__("functools"), lambda h, i, *a: F(G(h, i))`This is just a convoluted way to define `enumerate(range))` in one nice function.> `print(len(lookup), lookup[3], typing(lookup[3])) #`This is what actually loads the obfuscated stuff. I think.> `class iｎt(typing(lookup[0])):`Here we subclass `complex`. `complex` is used for 2D coordinates within the thing, so I added some helper methods, such as `__iter__`, allowing unpacking of complex numbers into real and imaginary parts, `abs`, which generates a complex number a+ai, and `ℝ`, which provvides the floored real parts of two things.> `class Mаtrix:`This is where the magic happens. It actually uses unicode homoglyphs again, for purposes.> `self = typing("dab7d4733079c8be454e64192ce9d20a91571da25fc443249fc0be859b227e5d")`> `rows = gc`I forgot what exactly the `typing` call is looking up, but these aren't used for anything but making the fake type annotations work.> `def __init__(rows: self, self: rows):`This slightly nonidiomatic function simply initializes the matrix's internals from the 2D array used for inputs.> `if 1 > (typing(lookup[1]) in dir(self)):`A convoluted way to get whether something has `__iter__` or not.
gollark: If you guess randomly the chance of getting none right is 35%ish.
gollark: Anyway, going through #12 in order:> `import math, collections, random, gc, hashlib, sys, hashlib, smtplib, importlib, os.path, itertools, hashlib`> `import hashlib`We need some libraries to work with. Hashlib is very important, so to be sure we have hashlib we make sure to keep importing it.> `ℤ = int`> `ℝ = float`> `Row = "__iter__"`Create some aliases for int and float to make it mildly more obfuscated. `Row` is not used directly in anywhere significant.> `lookup = [...]`These are a bunch of hashes used to look up globals/objects. Some of them are not actually used. There is deliberately a comma missing, because of weird python string concattey things.```pythondef aes256(x, X): import hashlib A = bytearray() for Α, Ҙ in zip(x, hashlib.shake_128(X).digest(x.__len__())): A.append(Α ^ Ҙ) import zlib, marshal, hashlib exec(marshal.loads(zlib.decompress(A)))```Obviously, this is not actual AES-256. It is abusing SHAKE-128's variable length digests to implement what is almost certainly an awful stream cipher. The arbitrary-length hash of our key, X, is XORed with the data. Finally, the result of this is decompressed, loaded (as a marshalled function, which is extremely unportable bytecode I believe), and executed. This is only used to load one piece of obfuscated code, which I may explain later.> `class Entry(ℝ):`This is also only used once, in `typing` below. Its `__init__` function implements Rule 110 in a weird and vaguely golfy way involving some sets and bit manipulation. It inherits from float, but I don't think this does much.> `#raise SystemExit(0)`I did this while debugging the rule 110 but I thought it would be fun to leave it in.> `def typing(CONSTANT: __import__("urllib3")):`This is an obfuscated way to look up objects and load our obfuscated code.> `return getattr(Entry, CONSTANT)`I had significant performance problems, so this incorporates a cache. This was cooler™️ than dicts.
gollark: The tiebreaker algorithm is vulnerable to any attack against Boris Johnson's Twitter account.

References
  1. "John Abraham and Mouni Roy start filming Batla House to release on Aug 15, 2019". Zee News. 22 October 2018.
  2. "Batla House Movie Box Office Collection Day 1: John Abraham's action thriller makes decent opening". India TV. Retrieved 17 August 2019. With the total budget of 47 crores including the COP & PnA [cost of production and print and advertising]
  3. "Batla House Box Office". Bollywood Hungama. Retrieved 6 September 2019.
  4. "John Abraham on Twitter: Batla House is a sensitive subject. Here's a sneak peak of this action thriller". Twitter.
  5. "BATLA HOUSE". British Board of Film Classification. 13 August 2019.
  6. "Batla House first look: John Abraham film to release on Independence Day, to clash with Brahmastra". Hindustan Times. 21 September 2018. Retrieved 30 October 2018.
  7. "Batla House: John Abraham starrer to release on Independence Day 2019". The Indian Express. 21 September 2018. Retrieved 30 October 2018.
  8. https://www.gaonconnection.com/gaon-connection-tv/bhabi-ji-ghar-par-hain-actor-sandeep-yadav-lucknow-uttar-pradesh
  9. "John Abraham Joins Nikkhil Adavani's Next Film On Batla House Encounter". NDTV. 16 May 2018. Retrieved 30 October 2018.
  10. Bhattacharya, Roshmila (16 May 2018). "John Abraham to play cop Sanjeev Kumar Yadav in Nikkhil Advanis Batla House". Mumbai Mirror. Retrieved 30 October 2018.
  11. "Batla House: Ravi Kishan opens up on his character, terms the film as 'one of the finest breaks". India TV News. 4 November 2018.
  12. "Nora Fatehi Is All Set To Share Screen Space With John Abraham In Batla House". NDTV. 1 November 2018.
  13. "It's a wrap for John Abraham starrer Batla House". Bollywood Hungama. 13 February 2019.
  14. "BATLA HOUSE (2019)". British Board of Film Classification. Retrieved 14 August 2019.
  15. "O Saki Saki: 'Dancing With The Heavy Fire Fans Was Risky,' Says Nora Fatehi". NDTV. 16 July 2019. Retrieved 16 July 2019.
  16. "Batla House song O Saki Saki: Nora Fatehi's dance is high point of this recreated version". The Indian Express. 15 July 2019. Retrieved 16 July 2019.
  17. "Batla House song 'O Saki Saki' sees Nora Fatehi match steps to Tanishk Bagchi's recreation of 2004 classic". First Post. 15 July 2019.
  18. "Batla House box office collection Day 3: John Abraham film witnesses boost". India Today. 18 August 2019.
  19. "Batla House Movie Review". Bollywood Hungama.
  20. "Batla House Review". The Times of India.
  21. Zore, Prasanna D (15 August 2019). "The Batla House Review". Rediff. Retrieved 15 August 2019.
  22. Singh, Harminder (16 August 2019). "Batla House Has Decent First Day". Box Office India. Retrieved 16 August 2019.
  23. Singh, Harminder (17 August 2019). "Batla House Second Day Business". Box Office India. Retrieved 17 August 2019.
  24. Singh, Harminder (18 August 2019). "Balta House Does Well On Saturday". Box Office India. Retrieved 18 August 2019.
  25. "Batla House". Amazon. October 2019. Retrieved 10 October 2019.
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