55 - Mark Reviews Movies

55, Quiver Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 28, 2025

Faces and names are the starting point of 55, as we're introduced to seemingly random citizens of Mumbai. They're all connected, however, to a 16-year-old boy, who knows these names and faces, although it's only because he has stolen their ID cards, along with money or other valuables. The boy stares at a mirror, reciting the names one by one and looking into a mirror as he does so, trying to see, it appears, if any of them fit his face.

The boy has no name, after all. He is an orphan, currently part of a Dickensian group of kids of various ages and without family and/or homes who pick the pockets, nab the purses, and swipe accessories from people. Like his fellow thieves, this boy does have a number, though, that serves as a sort of name and is tattooed on his arm. It is, as the title tells us, 55—or Pachpan (Rizwan Shaikh) in Hindi.

Pachpan has only known loneliness and poverty before being taken in by Sagar Bhai (Emraan Hashmi), the leader of this gang of young pickpockets who do artfully dodge any police interference or criminal responsibility for their crimes by following their boss' rules. Anyone who breaks those rules, as one boy learns after robbing an American tourist who chases the kid through the city streets and alleyways and even into an open sewer, receives a choice. Sagar's cane will either smash a hand or break a kneecap.

There is little, in other words, that feels particularly optimistic about co-writer/director Shyam P. Madiraju's film, because life for these urchins is one of utter desperation. They have to steal, or Sagar will surely toss them from his hideout, complete with beds and food and a cut of what they steal, and out into the street—possibly after destroying a hand or knee, too.

One of the unspoken rules of this gang is that a thief shouldn't follow up on any of their victims. What good would it do? It's not as if the money or ID cards or valuables can be returned to them, because Sagar has distributed or sold them among his crew and to continue paying off the police to turn a blind eye. After he steals a significant amount of cash from one man, a curious Pachpan, Sagar's most skilled and profitable thief, decides to track him down and follow him for a bit. The results become a wake-up call for the boy, because everyone can be desperate in some way and about something.

The most significant elements of Madiraju's film are its sense of style, which presents its plot and setting and characters in a shared state of bustling symbiosis, and its inherent compassion for almost every character of note within this story. Pachpan, of course, is the tormented heart of the tale—a boy who has never stopped to consider the consequences of his actions, because it wouldn't help anyone. Upon witnessing firsthand how his deeds can ruin lives, he becomes stricken by a conscience he might not have had time to realize he possessed in the first place. A person is more than a name, after all.

There are other characters here, such as a sex worker named Isha (Diksha Nisha) who seems to genuinely connect with Pachpan because they're both stuck in lives over which they have no control. Most importantly, though, are that man with the abundant cash Pachpan robbed and his two daughters. While following the man, the pickpocket learns that the money would have been used as a dowry to ensure that his elder daughter Uma (Dhanshree Patil) could marry a man who could afford to give her a better life than he ever could. The family has been devastated by the death of the man's wife, the girls' mother, to cancer.

Feeling as if there is nothing left for him to do, the father throws himself in front of a train. Pachpan decides to move into a neighboring apartment, in order to learn more about the daughters and to give them groceries, as well as some money, in exchange for homecooked meals from Uma.

Obviously, the plot of Madiraju and Shahin Khosravan's screenplay includes a couple more complications, namely that Pachpan's fellow thieves begin to notice his absence, while suspecting that he might be stealing on the side without Sagar's knowledge, and that a couple of loan sharks, who gave the father the dowry money with the family's apartment as collateral, come calling for the daughters to repay their dead father's debt. All of it comes together to confirm the feeling we get from the very introduction to Pachpan and his world—that there are corruption, heartlessness, and cruelty everywhere, while the only hope is that one can stay ahead of or above it by whatever means are available.

Pachpan comes to see that in Uma, as the two spend time together—without him saying why he wants to help her and her family in the first place. The story builds and builds toward what seems to be even more ruin, because of those jealous thieves, the violent debt collectors, Sagar's unforgiving nature, and the truth of Pachpan's connection to Uma's family.

The only question, perhaps, is whether or not anyone within this story can extend the same level of compassion the filmmakers show to so many of these characters. Without saying either way, 55 is so invested in its world and characters that we do come to hope for some good to come of and to them—as unlikely as any chance of that may seem.

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