Hanuman Ansh (2026) Movie Review

The film opens in pre-Independence India and follows young Lakshman Das after the death of his mother, a loss that sends him out of the house and into a search for the divine rather than into grief in the conventional sense.

What follows is less a plot in the three-act sense and more a procession of encounters, temples, forests, rivers, villages, each one nudging the boy closer to the understanding that would eventually define him as Neem Karoli Baba.

Chaturvedi resists the temptation to turn this into an origin story with a villain and a climax.

There isn’t a real antagonist here, which is a bold choice for a film that still runs two and a half hours, and it puts enormous pressure on tone and performance to keep the audience invested scene to scene.

The casting story behind the lead is genuinely unusual and worth mentioning, because it shapes what you see on screen.

Shobhinaw Satyaa was originally the film’s second assistant director, and stepped into the title role only after the actor initially cast fell ill during the first shooting schedule in Chitrakoot.

That’s not a footnote you’d usually build a review around, but it matters here because Satyaa’s performance doesn’t carry the polish of someone who trained for months to play a saint.

It carries something closer to sincerity, which is either the film’s biggest strength or its most obvious limitation depending on what you walked in expecting.

The film’s best instinct is restraint.

Chaturvedi keeps the emotional register low and steady rather than pushing for the swelling, tearful crescendos that devotional dramas usually reach for.

Grief here is quiet, and so is faith, and there’s a version of this film that could have leaned hard into melodrama and didn’t.

Satyaa plays the character with an unforced simplicity that suits the material, and the younger actors around him, particularly Vihaan Shedge in the teenage portions, don’t overplay their scenes either.

Location work in Chitrakoot gives the film a texture that a studio backlot never could, and the choice to actually build practical elements like the Hanuman idol installation and Baba’s cave on location rather than fake them digitally pays off in small, tactile ways.

The devotional soundtrack does a lot of quiet heavy lifting too, functioning less as background score and more as connective tissue between scenes that otherwise have very little conventional narrative momentum.

Here’s where I have to be honest about the budget, because it is impossible to separate this film from its ₹2 crore production cost, and the film doesn’t always disguise that limitation well.

Some stretches, particularly in the film’s back half, feel less like a theatrical drama and more like an extended documentary reenactment, unhurried to the point of testing patience even for viewers who came in receptive to a slow, meditative pace.

The bigger issue for me is a structural one rather than a technical one.

A story about a man who taught that devotion is service, not spectacle, keeps reaching for spectacle anyway, leaning on staged miracles rather than sitting with the harder, more interesting question of what the search for God actually costs a person internally.

That’s a real tension in the film, and it’s one Chaturvedi never quite resolves, because the moments where Hanuman Ansh is strongest are the plain, unhurried ones, and the moments it seems least sure of itself are the ones dressed up as miraculous.

Supporting characters, including Chandan Anand’s Bhonsle, get thin characterization, existing mostly to react to the protagonist rather than to pull their own narrative weight, which flattens the middle stretch of the runtime.

The soundtrack leans entirely into devotional territory, and that’s the correct instinct for a film like this rather than a limitation.

There’s no attempt to modernize the sound with a commercial hook or an item number shoved in for marketing, which some viewers might read as a lack of ambition, but I’d call it consistency.

Where the sound design genuinely helps the film is in the quieter outdoor sequences, where ambient forest and river sound does more emotional work than the dialogue around it.

Mostly, yes, though with real caveats.

As a standalone theatrical experience measured against slicker devotional hits it’s inviting comparison to, Hanuman Ansh doesn’t have the scale or the technical confidence of something like Mahavatar Narsimha, and it knows it, which is why it wisely never tries to compete on those terms.

What it has instead is sincerity, and for a large section of its audience, sincerity has clearly been enough.

The film’s real-world trajectory backs this up.

According to reports covering its release, the modestly budgeted film grew from a small opening into a sleeper hit through positive audience word of mouth, which tells you something the reviews alone can’t. Nera News

This isn’t a film chasing multiplex spectacle audiences.

It’s chasing, and largely reaching, the audience that already has a personal connection to Neem Karoli Baba and Kainchi Dham, and for that audience, the film’s unpolished honesty is probably the entire point rather than a flaw to forgive.

If you have any existing devotion toward Neem Karoli Baba, or an interest in Indian spiritual biography told without commercial gloss, this is worth your time and probably worth watching in a theatre with an audience that shares that intent, because the communal experience seems to be doing real work here.

If you’re coming in purely for production value, visual scale, or a tightly plotted biographical drama, temper your expectations, because the ₹2 crore budget is visible throughout, and the film asks for patience it doesn’t always earn in its slower second half.

As the opening chapter of a planned trilogy, Hanuman Ansh works better as a promise than as a complete statement, sincere in its intentions, uneven in its execution, and clearly more interested in devotion than in filmmaking craft for its own sake.