The opening 10 minutes of Devashish Makhija’s Gandhari is perhaps the clearest indication of the film’s intentions — and its intellect. Written and produced by Kanika Dhillon, it opens with the kidnapping of a five-year-old travelling with her parents on a train. When her mother, Bani (Taapsee Pannu), realises her daughter is missing, she tears through a crowded platform after the kidnapper, only to be knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. And because Gandhari apparently has no interest in leaving suffering at merely one notch, we soon learn that the injury has also temporarily robbed Bani of her eyesight.
From there, the film’s idea of character development appears to be little more than a contest in accumulated misery. A traumatised and blind mother, leaning on a walking stick and waiting outside a police station, hoping they will help find her daughter: it is an image so nakedly engineered to elicit pity and helplessness that it barely registers as characterisation. In the next scene, the film piles on another layer of dread: as the parents grow increasingly desperate, a passerby tells them that if kidnapped children are not found within 48 hours, they are unlikely to be found at all. This is, in fact, Gandhari’s preferred mode of persuasion: pile misfortune onto a character, arrange it into a sufficiently potent image, and assume the audience will fall in line.
By which I mean that the opening is the film’s entire emotional thesis. Before we have any meaningful sense of the plot or the characters, Dhillon has already decided what the audience should feel about Bani. Her suffering becomes her personality; her misfortune becomes her motivation. The more terrible things that happen to her, the more firmly Gandhari assumes we will stand behind her when she becomes an avenging mother. The film seems unable to distinguish between giving a character trauma and giving her depth, or between showing suffering and creating emotional investment.
The struggle with storytelling
Set in a fictional town in West Bengal, Gandhari begins with a kidnapped child and gradually tumbles into a child-trafficking racket, with detours into Paatal Lok (crime thriller streaming on Amazon), the Bahurupi (rural performers) community, mysterious women, morally ambiguous villains, spectacularly inefficient cops, some truly astonishingly bad reacting and Swastika Mukherjee appearing in brownface. It is as though every thriller convention and vaguely ominous cultural reference available to the filmmakers has been crammed into the screenplay, with the presence itself expected to create complexity.
The film keeps widening its conspiracy as Bani begins investigating on her own, but the more it adds, the less coherent it becomes. There is a supposedly terrifying trafficking gang, a succession of suspicious characters and a twist that is so regressively idiotic that it feels designed to provoke anyone still paying attention.
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More fundamentally, Gandhari struggles with the elementary mechanics of storytelling. It has remarkably little faith in the audience’s ability to infer anything and even less faith in cinema as a medium capable of communicating without somebody explaining what is happening. Almost every piece of information is verbalised through ponderous, unnatural dialogue, while anything that cannot be explained is shoved into a flashback. Characters tell us what they are feeling, what they have done, what happened in the past and what we are supposed to understand about the present. Nothing really unfolds; it is simply relayed to us.
The film’s title promises a metaphor it is nowhere near equipped to explore. The Mahabharata’s Gandhari chooses to blindfold herself in solidarity with her blind husband, Dhritarashtra; Bani’s blindness, by contrast, is imposed on her through the trauma of her daughter’s disappearance and subsequently becomes part of her transformation into a vigilante figure.
There might have been something interesting to examine in the distinction between empathy and vengeance. Instead, the film seems satisfied that both women wear something over their eyes. This is the other pattern at work in Gandhari: almost every metaphor eventually gets reduced to a prop, a flashback or a fight.
No relief from Taapsee Pannu
There is a corresponding lack of modulation in the filmmaking. Every development arrives at maximum intensity, every emotional beat is underlined and every threat is announced as though the film is terrified that we might miss it. Violence, background score, exposition and reaction shots are continually piled on top of one another until they begin to blur into noise. This is a film that has the subtlety of a fire alarm.
There is also something dispiriting about what Gandhari asks Taapsee Pannu to do. She spends much of the film crying, screaming, raging, fighting and staggering through scenes in a state of perpetual distress. It is effectively a performance that seems to equate emotional depth with acting difficulty. Pannu is asked to throw everything at Bani, but very little of it requires the things that actually make acting interesting: interiority, contradiction, restraint or specificity.
In fact, it points to a worrying reality: of late, Pannu, one of Hindi cinema’s most gifted actors, seems to be making increasingly sub-standard choices that are dressed up as demanding roles. Apart from Manmarziyaan, her collaborations with Kanika Dhillon have yielded some of her laziest, most forgettable work, and Gandhari does little to suggest that either of them is interested in breaking that pattern. Perhaps it is time Pannu broke away from this particular creative partnership and sought out the kind of roles that made her such an interesting actor in the first place.
The writing is even more difficult to process given how many of its decisions ultimately sit with Dhillon, who is credited for the story, screenplay, dialogue and creative production. Dhillon’s earlier work was hardly compelling, but even her more frustrating films tended to possess an appetite for the strange. There was usually some evidence of a writer trying to bend the form, even when the results were spectacularly uneven. Gandhari feels almost perversely devoid of that impulse. Its ideas are obvious, its dialogue is functional to the point of absurdity and its characters are assembled from familiar thriller tropes. Whatever made Dhillon’s writing unpredictable in the past has here been replaced by something much flatter: a screenplay that seems barely interested in what writing can do.
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That Gandhari has found a home on Netflix is perhaps the most unsettling part of the story. That is to say that the move away from the theatrical box office has removed one of the few immediate, visible consequences of making a bad film. Streaming offers a much murkier afterlife, where success can be reduced to opaque viewership figures and celebratory rankings that tell us little about whether audiences actually liked what they watched.
Gandhari is a particularly depressing example of that.