Daayra has made it through the censor board largely untouched, and for a film built on an encounter killing and its moral fallout, that's the headline.

The Meghna Gulzar directorial, starring Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran, was submitted to the Central Board of Film Certification with its violent sequences and confrontational dialogue intact. The board had no issue with the visuals. Its only ask was a single word swapped in one of Ajooni's lines, roughly two hours into the film, where a reference was changed to 'Minister.' The makers made the tweak and the film was passed on September 11 with an A certificate.

That gives Daayra a final run time of two hours and 23 minutes, according to Filmfare, which reported on the CBFC screening details ahead of the film's release.

For a story about a brutal crime and a contested extra-judicial encounter, told from both sides of the law, the near-clean pass matters. Kareena plays DCP Ajooni Kohli, an investigator who plays it strictly by the book. Prithviraj is DCP Raman Kumar, the encounter specialist who'd rather deliver justice on the spot than wait for a courtroom to get there. That's the spine of the film, two cops, two philosophies, one crime scene between them. Films that dramatise encounter killings tend to walk into censor trouble, either through mandated cuts or diluted dialogue. Daayra appears to have avoided both.

The makers, per the same report, see this as a win on their own terms. Nothing sanded down, nothing softened for a certificate. Whether that unfiltered version lands with audiences the way it apparently landed with the board is the actual test, and that test starts Friday.

Daayra opens in a wide theatrical release on September 18. Kareena has been out promoting it through the week, most recently at events built around the film, alongside co-star Prithviraj. The promotional push has run parallel to a separate conversation online, Ramanand Sagar's grandson Shiv Sagar telling reporters he isn't sold on Ranbir Kapoor playing Ram in an unrelated project, adding that the audience will have the final word there too. Different film, same principle, really. Casting and censor certificates can only get you to the theatre door. What happens once people are actually watching, that's out of anyone's hands.

For Daayra, the immediate business now is footfalls. An A-rated crime thriller with an intact runtime and no visual trims gives distributors a clean print to sell, but a two-hour-23-minute investigative drama built on procedural back-and-forth isn't the easiest opening weekend proposition either. September 18 will tell whether Gulzar's version of the story, kept whole by the board, finds the audience it was made for.