An incoherent ‘Gandhari’ stars Taapsee Pannu as a mother who pretends to be blind to search for her kidnapped daughter in a shady town
‘Gandhari’ Movie Review: A Blinding Mess Posing As a Revenge Thriller. If I were younger and brasher, I’d start this review with something as direct as: Gandhari is one of the worst Hindi films of the year. I’d rant about how it creates a world record for the number of scenes in which characters speak off-screen so as to hide the clunky exposition and dialogue added in post-production; how lip-syncing is a mythical concept; how this is salvage-job filmmaking at its peak. I’d go on about how the movie treats feminism, motherhood, child trafficking, gender-based violence, trauma and breathing as a smug SoBo aesthetic; how the phrase “my culture is not your costume” was invented for screenplays like these. I’d balk at the Do Patti-coded twists, disorienting music and editing, disjointed acting and disingenuous metaphors. I’d be outraged by the film’s Haseen Dillruba-coded lens of toxic love, where the scene of a husband and wife literally clobbering each other is scored to a romantic ballad: such a ‘punchy’ love language. I’d be angry to the point of incoherence, much like the film in question.
Cast: Taapsee Pannu, Ishwak Singh, Mita Vashisht, Chhaya Kadam, Swastika Mukherjee, Jatin Sarna, Priti Shroff, Prashant Narayanan
Director: Devashish Makhija
Screenwriter: Kanika Dhillon
Language: Hindi
