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Star Cast: Taapsee Pannu, Ishwak Singh, Mita Vashisht, Swastika Mukerjee, Chandan Roy, Prashant Narayanan
Director: Devashish Makhija
What’s Good: Probably the title that draws your attention!
What’s Bad: The title that makes no sense in the film!
Loo Break: Take a nap break instead!
Watch or Not?: You can skip it!
Language: Hindi
Available On: Netflix
Runtime: 1 hour 58 Minutes
User Rating:
What do you expect from a film that is titled after the most tragic queen of the Mahabharata? A powerful story that backs her blindfold so strongly that you cannot question the wrongdoings of her side because you genuinely empathize with her losses! For a quick revision, Gandhari was the woman who probably lost the most in the battle of Kurukshetra! While she decided to blindfold herself because of her blind husband, the King of the Kuru kingdom, Dhritashatra, she surrendered to her fate as well, witnessing mayhem and the end of an entire clan! Her own clan! Ironically, something similar happens to Taapsee Pannu in this film! She is so blindfolded that she cannot see a script killing itself at the hands of writer Kanika Dhillon’s self-obsession and pretentiously blinded understanding of a powerful female character!
Taapsee Pannu goes full throttle in a mother-on-revenge thriller that borrows the name of the film from Mahabharata’s one of the most sympathized women – Gandhari! However, Taapsee Pannu, in Devashish Makhija’s world, creates a literally hollow impact, mistaking the mythological branding to be the hero of the film!
Kanika Dhillon’s screenplays have always operated on too much – Manmarziyaan and Haseen Dillruba both leaned into melodrama, taking the sensitivity out of the picture, despite relying heavily on grief, pain, heartbreak, and chaos! Gandhari borrows that same instinct, but yet again, it serves a plot that loses logic way too soon, is abrupt, and is lost in self-glory!
Gandhari Movie Review: Script Analysis
The story of the film is something you have heard a trillion times -on and off screen! Bani (Taapsee Pannu) loses her 5-year-old daughter at a chaotic railway station in Joypurra. A brutal assault in the aftermath leaves her temporarily blind. Grief-stricken, she has to claw her way into the underbelly of Joypurra – a fictional town that breathes through rituals, masks, and old folklore of Chaumukhi Maa protecting the town of Joypurra from the devil Magarasura, who emerged from the Pataal Lok! So far, so good!
The town is ruled by Behrupas – folk performers who take different identities! How does Taapsee find her child? Why does she have to be blindfolded for that? Does she find the Magarasur? Does she turn into Chaumukhi Mata herself – all forms the crux of a very weak story!
Gandhari Movie Review: Star Performance
Taapsee Pannu is the film’s anchor. She tries to commit to Bani’s physicality – this is a genuinely demanding, action-heavy role, and she handles the specific challenge. She has done it before in Baby! But I cannot relate to her here! I do not find the grief and helplessness of a mother! I do not see the urgency to find the daughter! I do not see anything that makes this portrayal emotional! Ishwak Singh, as the father, is reliable but confined to a role that never gets enough texture! Wasting an entire brilliant ensemble of Swastika Mukherjee, Mita Vashisht, Chhaya Kadam, Prashant Narayanan, and Chandan Roy is so tough, but the writer has pulled this off with so much ease, not giving any of them any defined character arcs! Oh yes, I forgot Jatin Sarna, because the film also forgets him midway!
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Gandhari Movie Review: Direction, Music
Director Devashish Makhija builds the world well – the station tragedy, the attack, the blinding, and honestly, it is the film’s most efficient stretch – fast paced, brutal, and legitimately unsettling. But the very next moment, the film lands in Joypurra’s behrupiya underworld belly, and this is where the pacing collapses. The trafficking network mechanics stay vague, even as the film intends to shock you!
The final confrontation of the film turns bizarre as it rushes to deliver the thrill it hasn’t earned, resolving plot threads with the speed of the Rajdhani Express! Makhija appears to be sandwiched between two different films – the folklore of Magrasur and Chaumukhi Maa, mixed with Gandhari’s unnecessary name inspiration, and Behrupa’s rituals. The other film is a revenge-actioner thriller that generally such films are – right from Kahaani to Mom, from Baby Do Die to Mardaani, and more!
The timeline and the social status of the protagonist are so underdeveloped that I took an eternity to figure out where they exactly belong! I see a mobile phone after almost 15 – 20 minutes, or not even then! I am not sure if the film is set in the 90s or if the protagonists cannot afford a phone! For instance, you think that the protagonists might not be that well off financially, but then you see their home in flashbacks! You see them residing in an entirely new city to find their daughter, and honestly, I lost my will even to figure out where they belong!
The score, built around the folk theme, should have been such a highlight to assure goosebumps, but it does not work as texture – it is so underwhelming in the final behrupiya sequences. The song at the end is equally vague – so much so that I do not even remember it!
Gandhari Movie Review: The Last Word
Basically, the major problem with Gandhari is its writing! The bones are Mardaani (a woman infiltrating a trafficking ring), fused with Baby Karmarkar (a blind woman trying to find an evil man who killed her sister), and all of this is set on the blueprint of Delhi Crime‘s latest season on girl trafficking! Kanika Dhillon then decorates this blend with Mahabharata’s Gandhari for a very lame reason – the queen who blindfolded herself for decades, and as a result could not save her clan, turning a blind eye to every wrong thing they did! It’s a genuinely compelling image to build a film around. The trouble is that the film treats it as an image only – a woman who blindfolds herself! You can call her Lady Justice statue and it would still be the same – pointless! Bani’s rage is personal and immediate, and the mythological title promises a structural parallel the screenplay never actually builds.
The Mahabharata framing – the title, the blindness motive, and the modern Kurukshetra- makes no sense to me! You could retitle this film after any grieving epic mother – Draupadi’s humiliation, Kunti’s abandonment, or, for God’s sake, call it Jhansi Ki Rani, and almost nothing structurally changes for this film! The clearest evidence is that calling this film Gandhari is merely a marketing gimmick because apparently, anything remotely mythological is selling like hotcakes! Moreover, calling the film Gandhari, when you cannot even protect your fake blindfold image for more than 20 minutes, is downright lame!
The dialogues in this film are more self-absorbed than anything! In one of the scenes, Taapsee’s Bani sits with her husband, Gokul, their daughter still missing, and she tells him – Jagah ke sabse bade behrupiye to hum hain! Pointing out the brilliant, hideous plans they carved! So much for self-glory and narcissism?!
A film that name-checks an epic mythological character needed to do more than borrow its title and one visual metaphor – blindness, to earn that comparison. 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!
1.5 stars.
Gandhari Trailer
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