‘Gandhari’ Review: Why Taapsee Pannu’s New Movie Is A Chaotic Mess

What happens when “Kahaani”, “Mardaani”, and “Andhadhun” walk into a bar and get sloshed after a wild night? The morning-after regret is “Gandhari”, an incurable hangover that makes you want to quit alcohol completely.

The film opens with a young girl singing a poem about a bird that lost its way at Joypurra station. It is an opening that could not make its lack of subtlety any more obvious, signaling right away that subtlety left the building long ago. Bani (Taapsee Pannu) and her husband Gokul (Ishwak Singh) are traveling to Gomvati for a holiday with their daughter Mishti when Bani steps away to use the restroom. The girl wanders off, gets lured by kids singing poems, and vanishes into thin air. When Bani rushes out, she gets clobbered by a heavy steel construction object and goes temporarily blind.

What follows is an incurable cinematic hangover. Bani loses her sight, yet the audience is left waiting in vain for any real sense of despair from the couple, who seem bafflingly content to just sit back and rely on the police. The local extras playing the parents of other kidnapped children display infinitely more emotion than our lead couple, whose child has just been swallowed by a local mafia network ominously named Blackhole.

Related Stories

‘Baahubali: Before The Beginning’ DoP Mukesh G On Netflix Shelving The Series: ‘Two Seasons Were Completely Shot’ (EXCLUSIVE)

After ‘Black Warrant’, Rahul Bhat Reunites with Netflix India for Ambitious Heist Thriller Series (EXCLUSIVE)

The story pulls heavily from better films, attempting to blend “Kahaani”, “Mardaani”, and “Andhadhun” into one messy concoction. It shamelessly recycles the frantic "desperate person searching for a missing loved one" hunt from “Kahaani”, copies the gritty crime ring exploiting young women and girls from “Mardaani”, and throws in “Andhadhun’s” classic trope of a protagonist faking blindness to navigate the chaos. We have seen every single one of these elements executed brilliant before, separately. There was absolutely zero need to drag them all into the same room and force them into a desperate, bloated group project.

There is a no-nonsense cop named Kabir, played by Jatin Sarna, who looks like he means business before vanishing entirely from the narrative. There is an NGO run by Churni Didi, played by Swastika Mukherjee, and a suspicious character played by Chhaya Kadam, alongside Mita Vashisht, who functions as Bani's mentor to train her other senses. The film even invokes local folklore about Chamukhi Devi defeating the demon Magrasur to assure us that good will triumph over evil. Yet, despite all these layers, nothing feels remote, scary, or sinister. Finding the kidnapped girls feels like a walk in the park, lacking any genuine sense of stakes or challenge.

Then comes the attempt at a massive mid-movie revelation regarding Gokul’s past with the syndicate, designed to justify why he spent the first half acting less like an panicked father and more like a confused bystander. When the couple inevitably clashes over his motives with Gokul insisting his choices were strictly for their daughter while Bani grandstands about saving everyone else’s children a moment meant to carry raw emotional gravity turns unintentionally comical. To make matters worse, the filmmakers drown the entire argument in a melodramatic background song, proving that when a scene completely fails to land on its own merits, the soundtrack simply steps in to do the heavy lifting.

The final act plays out exactly as expected. In the last fifteen minutes, Bani confronts the main villain in a blackout setting where darkness is her ally, a sequence so cliché you almost expect the antagonist to start quoting Bane from Batman: "Oh, you think darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark; I was born in it, moulded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but BLINDING!" 

She kills him, the screen cuts, and it is finally over (much before the audience’s patience). On the performance front, Taapsee Pannu fails to hold attention, largely because the script forces her to juggle too many conflicting plot devices at once. Ishwak Singh fares no better; beyond a forgettable performance, his character is burdened by an unnatural brown makeup application apparently designed to signal lower social status, which comes across as wildly out of place. Ultimately, Gandhari is a chaotic, copy-paste disaster that forgets to give us villains to fear or heroes to root for, leaving you with a thriller so painfully boring, one might just stick to watching paint dry for their next dose of suspense.