Meghna Gulzar’s Daayra has arrived with its official trailer, bringing Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran together as police officers whose understanding of justice moves in different directions. Kareena Kapoor Khan plays DCP Ajooni Kohli, while Prithviraj Sukumaran plays DCP Raman Kumar. Inspired by true events, the film is set to release in cinemas on September 18, 2026, but the trailer’s most interesting detail is not simply the crime case at its centre. It is the uncomfortable space between law, duty and personal conviction.
What immediately separates Daayra from a routine police thriller is the position given to its two leads. Kareena Kapoor Khan’s Ajooni is not simply chasing a criminal, while Prithviraj Sukumaran’s Raman is not presented as a conventional antagonist. Both are senior officers, both have reasons for their decisions, and the film places their professional beliefs against each other.
That makes the first collaboration between Kareena Kapoor Khan and Prithviraj Sukumaran particularly notable. Instead of building their pairing around romance or a conventional hero-versus-villain setup, Meghna Gulzar uses two established actors to represent different ways of looking at the same system. Their scenes carry the weight of a disagreement between colleagues who understand the seriousness of their jobs but do not agree on where the line should be drawn.
The trailer’s case begins with a missing girl and brings juvenile offenders, police action and a controversial encounter into the picture. Ajooni’s investigation starts examining what happened around that encounter, while Raman remains firm about the decisions taken by his side. The details make the case larger than a simple investigation because the focus gradually shifts towards the actions of the people responsible for enforcing the law.
This is also where the title Daayra gains an interesting connection to the film’s subject. The story is concerned with boundaries: the limits of police power, the rules officers are expected to follow and the point at which the pursuit of justice can cross those limits. The trailer does not treat these ideas as background material. They are built into the central relationship between Ajooni and Raman.
Meghna Gulzar’s involvement becomes another important reason to watch how the film develops. As director and co-writer, alongside Yash Keswani and Sima Agarwal, she approaches the material through competing viewpoints rather than an easy moral answer. The trailer suggests that Daayra wants its characters to remain understandable even when their choices are difficult to defend.
The film also brings together two major production houses, Junglee Pictures and Pen Studios. Their backing gives the project a notable commercial scale, while the subject keeps its attention on a serious issue within the police system. The combination of a recognisable cast, a filmmaker known for grounded subjects and a story inspired by true events gives Daayra a distinct identity before its theatrical release.
Another striking aspect of the trailer is how little it depends on spectacle to establish tension. The conflict comes from conversations, investigations and decisions that could affect careers, reputations and lives. That restrained approach allows the characters and their choices to remain at the centre, rather than turning the film into a conventional action-driven police story.
The trailer’s focus on accountability gives the film another layer, because every official decision appears to carry consequences beyond the immediate case and the officers involved.
With its September 18 release approaching, Daayra now has a clear point of interest beyond its cast. Kareena Kapoor Khan, Prithviraj Sukumaran and Meghna Gulzar are using a crime story to examine the boundaries within which justice is supposed to operate. The trailer leaves the film’s biggest tension rooted in that idea, making its eventual resolution one of the most important parts of what lies ahead.
Watch Daayra Trailer:
