The actor-director addressed the A certificate and multiple cuts head-on at a press interaction, insisting the theatrical cut still lands the way he intended.
CULT has gone through the censor board and come out with an A certificate, several cuts and more than a few mutes attached to it. That's usually the kind of news that makes a filmmaker nervous two weeks before release. Vishwak Sen doesn't seem to be one of those filmmakers.
Asked directly about it during a media interaction on Wednesday, Sen told M9 that the trims wouldn't change how the film plays. He said he was happy with how the censor process had gone, which is not the line most directors reach for when their violent, intense film has been chopped up by the board.
The mutes are the part worth watching. Cuts remove footage. Mutes kill sound on visuals that otherwise stay in the frame, which can be a stranger thing to sit through if the dialogue or a sound effect was doing real work in that scene. CULT has reportedly been flagged for intense and violent content, so it's not hard to guess where the board's scissors went.
Here's the twist. Audiences outside India won't be watching the same cut. The overseas version of CULT releases without the Indian censor's trims, meaning viewers abroad get a version closer to what Sen originally shot. He maintains, though, that the difference is minor and that the film's impact holds up whether you're watching the Indian theatrical cut or the international one.
That's a claim that's easy to make before release and harder to defend after. Censor cuts have sunk the pacing of plenty of films that looked fine on paper, especially genre films built on tension and violence where a mute at the wrong second can take the air out of a scene. Sen clearly isn't worried. Whether that confidence survives contact with an audience watching the muted version in a packed first-day show is the actual test.
CULT already has enough riding on it without this conversation. The film is among the titles trade watchers have flagged as facing scheduling pressure this festive stretch, with release-date jostling very much part of the chatter around it right now. A censor dust-up landing this close to release adds one more thing for Sen and his team to manage before the film even gets to theatres.
For now, the official word from the director himself is that the cuts are a non-issue. The box office and the front rows will have the final say once CULT actually opens.
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