The final fifteen minutes are a masterclass in misdirection. When the credits roll over a surreal, blood-splattered image of the hillside, you will realize that the title is a lie. No one in the film is truly being themselves. They are all performing—for each other, for the police, and for their own fragile egos. Being Cyrus was not a box office hit. It was too slow for the masses and too violent for the art houses. But on DVD and late-night cable, it found its audience.
Remember the dinner table scene? No screaming. No dramatic background score. Just the scrape of cutlery and the slow realization that every character is silently negotiating a betrayal.
Published: A Retrospective
Uncomfortable. Brilliant. Unmissable.
Two decades later, we ask: What made this oddity so unforgettable? The plot is deceptively simple. A one-armed, disheveled artist named Cyrus (Saif Ali Khan) shows up at the doorstep of an eccentric, retired Parsi sculptor, Dinshaw Sethna (Naseeruddin Shah). Cyrus claims to be an admirer. But his eyes—hungry, intelligent, and utterly hollow—tell a different story. being cyrus -2005-
What follows is a slow, methodical infiltration. Cyrus doesn’t just enter the Sethna household; he unlocks it. He finds the secret cracks in the foundation: Dinshaw’s artistic impotence, his wife Katy’s (Dimple Kapadia) simmering sexual frustration, and the violent greed of their son, Fardounjee (Boman Irani). Director Homi Adajania, making his debut, did something radical. He treated an Indian-English film not with the reverence of art cinema, but with the gritty tension of a Coen brothers thriller. The camera lingers. The silences are deafening. The humor is so dry it draws blood.
It wasn’t just a film. It was a mood. A cynical, whiskey-soaked, and deeply unsettling portrait of a Parsi family eating itself alive. The final fifteen minutes are a masterclass in misdirection
It proved that Indian cinema could do dark, literary, and morally complex without apologizing. It paved the way for the "Haraamkhor" indie wave of the 2010s. And it remains the definitive film about the Parsi community’s internal anxieties—wrapped in a crime drama.
"Everything breaks. That’s the point." – Cyrus (2005) They are all performing—for each other, for the