Crime family saga is a cinematic sub-genre with more or less established conventions (mainly thanks to Godfather films) and it does not present comforable terrain to come up with original ideas. Anurag Kashyap and his crew securely overcome such obstacles and create a distinguished amalgam of particularism and universalism. The entire story is set in a very restricted locality (in and around Wasseypur and Dhanbad, except brief Varanasi sequences) and in specific periods of time but the themes it handles are thorougly universal in both time and space.

It may be argued that violence is aestheticized to an adamant degree but it is for granted that it is never gratuitous. Each depiction of violence has its own merit in progression of the story.