Inside a moving SUV in the national capital, four men take turns to rape a school teacher on her way home through a near-deserted road in a residential colony. The gruesome act unfolds while the man driving the car requests the beastly men to stop in a feeble voice.

Cinematographer Ewan Mulligan’s camera remains confined within the frame of the moving car. Each shot pausing on to the face of the perpetrators and those cheering on, keeping counts of each stroke amid chants of “Phattu”.

The survivor lies spattered in blood, staring at a red symbol somewhere on the window that she looks at during her assault.

The sequence reminds of a rather elaborate one from Meir Zarchi’s film I Spit on Your Grave. The 1976 film was explicit in its depiction of gang rape.

Anubhav Sinha’s Assi is brutal and unsparing.

Mulk (2018) onwards Sinha has moved into a style of filmmaking that has fewer and fewer practitioners left.

Assi cannot be dismissed as just another courtroom drama. The drama unfolds as much inside the court as outside.

A vigilante killer takes down two of the perpetrators while the trial is still on. He commits the first murder in the same spot where a brutalised Parima (played by Kani Kusruti) was dropped from the moving vehicle. The vigilante killer and the troops of supporters, especially online, that gather around him, is a ruse that Anubhav Sinha employs effectively.

An age-old question that has been asked again and again resurfaced. Is crime the answer to stop another crime?

Anubhav Sinha with fellow writer Gaurav Solanki does not provide easy answers.

An ensemble cast comprises Tapsee Pannu in the familiar character of a lawyer (she played the lawyer in Sinha’s Mulk), Kumud Mishra as a man driven by guilt and grief, Mohd. Zeeshan Ayyub as the enraged, supportive, empathic husband, who is unwilling to give up on his wife and neglect his young son.

Manoj Pahwa plays the father of one of the young men in the vehicle. He cannot accept his son’s guilt nor can he overcome the desire to protect him at all cost.

Kani, as Parima, is neither subdued nor melodramatic. A quiet sense of purpose drives her every movement, even when she is hallucinating in a hospital bed. While confronting the defence lawyer inside the courtroom she removes the veil, revealing her face, in a sudden movement. The defence lawyer, too, turns his face away. Kani’s Parima forces the audience to watch.

Taapsee, as lawyer Raavi, is relentless, fierce, and mildly sarcastic at times. Being the lawyer, she does get the best lines. But it is through her eyes in her confrontation with her defence lawyer and her interaction with a recuperating Parima, who is yet to regain her vision fully after the beating she took, that Taapsee shines.

Inside and outside the courtroom, Assi is a tale of how a horrific crime can upend lives, as much as that of the survivor as the perpetrators.

The film’s title Assi (80) derives from the number of rapes that take place across India every day.

Every 20 minutes, the screen goes red, reminding the audience that a rape has taken place somewhere while they were watching the film.

The film is set to release in theatres on February 20.