After 15 years of making films that have delighted his fans and impressed critics, Sriram Raghavan has finally got official recognition – his film Andhadhun has won a national award, and another one has gone to his lead actor, Ayushmann Khurrana. From his very first feature, Ek Haseena Thi (2004) onwards, the director has developed a distinctive style – Raghavan Noir, one could call it – that viewers can instantly recognise. It is a style that has not yet started looking jaded, despite its familiar elements.Andhadhun, his most successful commercial film yet, has all those elements, in spades. The twists and turns, the build-up of suspense without the use of the familiar tropes and the explorations of the shadowy recesses of the human mind, all done with a dash of black humour – the film has it all. Add to that his love for cheeky and cheesy 1970s references – in Andhadhun, it is the long-forgotten Anil Dhawan playing a 70s star, which gives Raghavan an opportunity to use songs from the era.Anil Dhawan in Andhadhun. Photo: YouTubeRaghavan loves the 1970s and knows all about its popular culture. He was a film junkie growing up in Pune at the time, and saw each and every film, including – especially – the B-grade ones. Hence, the innumerable riffs from the era. Johnny Gaddar – the name is a composite of two ‘70s films – had a plot twist borrowed from Parwana, one of Amitabh Bachchan’s earliest movies, while his next, Agent Vinod was the name of a 1977 pulp film that featured a desi James Bond-like character. Other 1970s vignette keep popping up – a character reads a James Hadley Chase novel in one, a touch of the Boney M. hit ‘Rasputin‘ in another.Also read: ‘Andhadhun’ Is a Thriller That Is Unexpectedly FunnyAll these amuse-bouche just add to the flavour. But Raghavan means business, and the light touches are simply to leaven the dark stories he tells. Most of his films are about an innocent bystander who gets sucked into a moral spiral where he must make choices that could change him for ever. Decent men become villains, criminals show their human side and the world looks greyer than ever. Greed, lust, vengeance are usually the motivations, but there is also decency and redemption, often in the most unlikely of places.In Badlapur – whose fundamental premise is loosely drawn from the 1950s noir The Big Heat – is about a yuppie who turns vigilante and murderer as he goes about taking revenge for the killing of his wife and child in a robbery gone wrong. And the young novice criminal in Johnny Gaddar simply wants to make some quick money to run away with the moll of a senior fellow criminal. These stories are told with great empathy while maintaining a distance from the characters, and Raghavan leaves the viewer to decide who are the heroes and who have an evil side.Sriram Raghavan. Photo: FacebookAndhadhun remains within familiar Raghavan territory but is altogether more ambitious – it is a frothier film, and occasionally the viewer gets the impression that some twists have been added because the writers – five of them, including Raghavan – while brainstorming, were enjoying themselves too much, so they wanted to share their jokes.The film tells the story of a sight-impaired pianist who lives alone and who one day, invited to the home of a faded film star, gets to know of a murder in the room. The body of the man is lying in the living room, a few feet away from where he is playing the piano, but he can’t see it. Or can he?From then onwards, the pianist’s life is turned upside down and when more murders follow, his life is put in danger. His handicap means he has to rely on the kindness of strangers who are anything but kind, and when the adulteress wife of the dead star gets after him, he is a marked man.Ayushmann Khurrana and Tabu execute their roles with finesse, the former convincing as a blind musician who has multiple sides to his personality and the more senior actor getting into the groove as a murderous younger wife of an older man. As always, the character actors add tremendous flavour to the film, especially Ashwini Kalsekar, a Raghavan staple who is an absolute delight in whatever she does.The latter half is needlessly stretched, as the writers take us down roads that have many bends in them, but it’s deliciously wicked and a definite crowd-pleaser. The denouement is a bit of a laugh, and, like in many other Raghavan films, leaves us wondering whether there are any good guys around at all. But the end result is very satisfying.For this writer, Johnny Gaddar remains his best outing so far. The pacing was steady, with very few digressions, and the atmosphere was suitably claustrophobic. Raghavan’s fans hated Agent Vinod, but it was an ambitious project, an attempt to create a proper spy franchise on a global scale, complete with plots of world domination and some Indo-Pakistan rivalry and (unexpected) co-operation.Raghavan can only get better from here onwards. There are so many stories to be told, of crime and humanity, of lives torn apart in most sudden ways, of good and evil and everything in between. The box-office success and award squarely places him in the big league, but one can only hope that it won’t spoil him and turn him into the manufacturer of blockbusters. We have many of those, but there is only one Sriram Raghavan having fun and taking us along.