Director Jayprad Desai’s Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba begins like a pulpy, C-grade Hindi novel: with high drama. On a dark, rainy night in Agra, a woman is running for her life on a deserted road. Her wispy-thin saree sticking to her like clingfilm, she dashes into a police station, screaming.
Her husband, she says, is going to kill her. She is Rani (Taapsee Pannu), currently married to Abhimanyu (Sunny Kaushal), a compounder. But at the police station, Rani encounters questions about her bloody past.
Three years ago, in the 2021 film, Hasseen Dillruba, Rani was married to Rishu (Vikrant Massey) but had taken a lover, Neel. Things didn't go as planned and she had struck Neel dead. And then she had helped cover up the murder with her husband’s severed arm.
As Phir Aayi Hasseen Dillruba goes into flashback—not to the 2021 film, but to a few weeks leading up to Rani's screaming entry into the police station—the plot thickens. Rani and Rishu have been living in Agra, incognito and separately. She worked at a beauty parlour and he took coaching classes.
Hiding from the police and careful never to be seen together, they had found innovative ways to talk to each other and plot their escape from India. Often they would use quotes from the novels of Rani’s favourite author Dinesh Pandit to communicate and pool their money for a one-way ticket to Thailand. After all, it was one of Panditji’s novels that inspired their escape after Rani had bludgeoned Neel to death.
But before.