Irrfan Khan Death Anniversary | How The Legendary Actor’s FTII Student Films Heralded His Genius

As an actor of constantly surprising newness, Irrfan Khan never needed a grand arc to show his might. Creeping up from the rims, he’d walk away with the film. In 2025, the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) put up a batch of six remastered student films with Khan flitting through a staggering range. It’s a deeply, often disturbingly pensive experimental bundle. The films mostly do away with elaborate plots, relying instead on fractured emotional landscapes. They are existentially accented—a jigsaw of complex, deceptive motivations. There’s a ghostly edge and energy to the films, wavering between riddles and sudden, revelatory angles. You might reach out for some plank of clue that can decode the film, but Khan appears viper-like, stealthily rolling around each film’s uncanny rhythm. Shot mostly in the early 90s, these films are mysterious and daring, allowing actors like Khan to go from troubling to troubled in myriad ways.

In the middle of Karan Bedi’s Manoeuvre (1992), Khan’s character plays Scrabble with a woman he desires. One word falls in place: neurotic. It’s key to the film’s warped psychology. Khan essays a killer, swinging between perverse impulses and stricken with a horrifying surge of memories. These brief flashbacks show glimpses of the bloody trail he has wrought. A passing encounter triggers a spate of violence which he had repressed. The film opens with a tense, coiled-up Khan driving through the night. He looks curiously at a woman who appears before the car. The moment of halt builds into an unnerving fixation. Fragments of his past reveal scenes of murder. The wordless film leans on his unpredictability. His fitful gaze betrays a haunted self. Khan’s lean, agile persona is frequently used across the shorts as an emphatic way of fusing into the shadows, before pouncing to ensnare the prey.

In several shorts, Khan brings a cracked composure. He’s the perturbing odd angle—a presence that destabilises and undercuts a prevailing mood. His face is often furrowed in anxiety. He looks like he’s seen something dire. Occasionally, you do get to see, up close, what he’s actually distressed by. They represent the dizzying chaos, avarice and tightening feudal structures of an India on the cusp of globalisation and modernity. Barring one short, he’s mostly a peripheral presence. Yet, when he’s in a scene, its lingering unease infects and shadows the entire film. These films hold early flashes of an actor who didn’t need to be propped up with reams of dialogue or a well-etched character to register invisible undercurrents. You could sense how he works with absent material, constantly seeking an edge—a flicker that says more than dialogue. There’s a compellingly brooding quality to the performances. He’s conflicted, restless, his glances simmering with a hidden map. Neither does he clearly give away all the inner, emotional creases. There’s an enigmatic distance he preserves between his character and the viewer.

Notice the layers with which he wreathes his flickering characters in Morning (1990) and Reconnaissance (1992). In the latter, he’s drifting through the debris of disaffection. He’s lost faith in the world, relationships, any anchorage whatsoever. He walks through the world—a sense of remove vividly jutting in between. Past experiences that didn’t end well cut in every now and then. But he struggles to articulate his keening disorientation. Khan is contemplative, aloof, asking you to identify with a crisis that’s otherwise vague and fuzzy. His loneliness drenches the screen. You feel a twinge for him, even as he keeps his core inaccessible.

In Leenus L. K. ‘s You Can’t Give Any Reason (1992), Khan is rendered a cripplingly marginal entity. Nameless and shorn of dignity, he’s tossed like a specimen in a professor’s class. His character exists at the bottom rung. In class, he’s flung about like a puppet. He’s said to be devoid of thinking. He does what he’s ordered. He bows, kneels, throws himself prostate at the feet of a class-superior man. A mockery is given free rein. His powerlessness is underlined by way of circus acts. It’s a terrifying vision of a world where the upper classes have fully consolidated their grip. Khan’s face is blank, inscrutable, drained of cues. It’s like he has suffered so much, he cannot react in any intelligible manner. Suddenly, he demonstrates small transgressions. He strays until he’s pulled back. Erratically, the film rearranges narrative structure. His family is taken away, his wife jailed and his daughter marooned in organ trafficking. Visiting his wife in prison, Khan is a portrait of desperation, an individual stripped of all resources. The bureaucrats jeer at him, reminding him that his hands are all tied up. Khan captures a person in his most humiliating abscesses.

A direct contrast rises in K Vinayan’s self-consciously philosophical A Briefcase Full of Reflexive Maladies (1992). Here, Khan is suave, strutting, demonstratively affluent and class-elevated. Nevertheless, interrogations into money and social class are as imperative in this film. Money is inextricable from social relationships and behaviour, overriding their usual extent. It colours how one forges or withholds a bond, playing into the fibre of social mechanisms. Khan is confident, sneering and rushing to dominate spaces instead of cowering at a corner like in You Can’t Give Any Reason. He throws his weight around, easy and relaxed in his commanding social rank. These films catch Khan at his most nascent phase. He was only starting out. But he already brandished a thrilling range, blending innocence and immorality.