Gandhari

On the whole, GANDHARI is a below-average revenge drama that is salvaged to an extent by Taapsee Pannu's powerful performance, an interesting setting and a few engaging moments.

While there are a few decent twists, Gandhari is eventually bogged down by its plot-driven nature and strangely, by its lack of emotional connect.

Gandhari is like a layer cake put together badly. There are layers upon layers. Blindness, motherhood, child trafficking, mythology, revenge, a mysterious deity, Behrupiya culture, police investigation, betrayal, organised crime… but the layers don't hold.

Overall, Gandhari has the ingredients of an emotionally charged thriller, but fails to bring them together. Its familiar premise gets a few interesting twists, and director Makhija stages the action with conviction, but the writing is too convenient and the emotional core too underdeveloped to make Bani's journey truly moving.

Gandhari wants to be a dark thriller about child trafficking, a mystery about a secretive town and an emotional story about a mother. The problem is that it never fully becomes any of the three.

Directed by Devashish Makhija whose previous 'Cheetpatakadumpa' made solid use of its leads' feminist energy, and written by Kanika Dhillon whose last outing with regular leading lady Taapsee Pannu was the well-done manohar kahani Phir Aayi Haseen Dilruba, Gandhari feels as if it has slipped between the cracks: it is neither impactful nor believable.

Gandhari had all the ingredients to be a bone-chilling, high-stakes thriller, but it gets crushed down by Kanika Dhillon's overambitious writing that is all over the place!

A mother losing her child is the kind of premise that needs very little embellishment to hurt. Gandhari, unfortunately, seems determined to add everything under the sun. Child trafficking, temporary blindness, disguises, mythology, revenge and a whole lot of action. The film has plenty going on, but somewhere between all these ideas, the actual emotional core gets buried.

But unlike other Bollywood women-led action films, Gandhari is rooted and grimy, steering clear of the gloss and glamour that often accompany the genre. Its world feels tactile, with the action grounded in a more recognisable, unvarnished reality rather than being packaged as spectacle. But that's not enough to elevate a bumpy screenplay. Plus, nuance isn't its strongest suit. This one is skippable.

Gandhari had the scope to tell a difficult story about child trafficking, poverty and institutional failure. Instead, it turns a devastating reality into a melodramatic thriller filled with convenient plotting and unbelievable twists.

After a bustling beginning, Gandhari lapses into a kind of nervous languidity. Written and produced by Kanika Dhillon and directed by Devashish Makhija, the Netflix release tries to draw juice from low-hanging fruit – child sex trafficking is one of the most unconscionable crimes – but comes up empty.

Ultimately, Gandhari is consumed by its own contradictions. Much like the underground network carving through Joypurra, the film's aimless maze of structural tunnels leads to nowhere.

It's also a deeply unsettling, uncomfortable film to sit through. Not because of its themes, its brutal violence or its 'monstrous' villains. But because this is a shrill, blurry, barely coherent movie that's a strong contender for the year's worst Hindi film.

Gandhari has the basis of a strong thriller but is sabotaged by its desire to keep turning the drama up a notch. Taapsee Pannu is committed, the action works at times, and Joypurra is an interesting cinematic world. But the screenplay is so obsessed with twists, mythology and spectacle that it forgets its best aspect: a mother's desperate struggle to bring her child home.

Taapsee Pannu's rescue thriller unfolds like a 90s-style drama in search of a contemporary voice. It gets lost in its own ambitions, desperately trying to be everything at once.