Tigmanshu Dhulia thinks Dhurandhar doesn't have a story. He said so out loud, at an Editors Guild of India event, and he wasn't being cute about it.

"But if you ask about his story, you won't be able to tell the story of Dhurandhar. There is a man who is an undercover spy, he goes to Pakistan and creates a ruckus there. This is not a story," Dhulia said, according to Bollywood Hungama. Fair warning: he wasn't touching the box office. The Ranveer Singh spy thriller has been doing brisk business and Dhulia left that part alone entirely. His problem is with the bones of the plot, not the money it's pulling in.

He didn't stop at one film, though. Dhulia went further, framing Dhurandhar as symptomatic of something bigger eating Hindi cinema.

One template, everywhere

"Stories are over in films. First of all, the storytellers are over and what they want to say is not allowed to be made. That story is not allowed to be told," he said. His diagnosis: writers and directors keep getting boxed in by what the market supposedly wants, until only one shape of film survives the process. "They feel that this film will not work. There is only one kind of template. This is what happens when there is extreme capitalism," he added.

And he took the argument off the screen entirely. Dhulia pointed to fashion, to haircuts, to the way one Indian city has started to resemble another, all of it evidence, in his telling, of commercialisation flattening difference wherever it goes. "People also start looking the same. You go to a boy's fashion. Everybody looks the same. Same haircut. Every city looks the same. The character of every city is over," he said.

Strong words from a man who's about to test his own theory in the market. Dhulia's next directorial, Ghamasaan, skips theatres altogether and premieres on ZEE5 on September 11, after sitting on the shelf for close to two years. Pratik Gandhi plays Aditya, an STF officer sent after Maharaj, a dacoit leader played by Arshad Warsi, in a manhunt set in the Bundelkhand badlands. The chase, per the makers, opens up into political corruption the deeper Aditya gets into Maharaj's territory, so this isn't pitched as a plain cops-and-robbers job either.

Whether Ghamasaan actually escapes the template Dhulia was just describing is a separate question, and one only the film itself can answer. He's spent two years waiting for an audience to find out. Come September 11, they will, and Dhulia's own argument gets put right back on trial.