Gandhari Movie Review: Taapsee Pannu’s Revenge Drama Has The Rage, But Kanika Dhillon’s Writing Gets Lost
Gandhari Movie Review: Taapsee Pannu leads this dark revenge thriller with conviction, but the film’s mythology-heavy concept and uneven writing prevent it from becoming the gripping mother-driven action drama it wants to be.
Star Cast: Taapsee Pannu, Ishwak Singh, Mita Vashisht, Swastika Mukerjee, Chandan Roy, Prashant Narayanan
Director: Devashish Makhija
Language: Hindi
Available On: Netflix
Runtime: 1 hour 58 minutes
What’s Good
Taapsee Pannu’s physical commitment and the film’s opening stretch.
What’s Bad
The screenplay tries to connect revenge, trafficking, folklore and the Mahabharata but never builds those elements into one coherent story.
Loo Break
You may want one.
Watch or Not?
You can skip it.
Gandhari Movie Review: A Promising Premise That Loses Its Way
Naming a film Gandhari immediately creates expectations. The Mahabharata character carries an extraordinary emotional history. She willingly covered her eyes after marrying the blind King Dhritarashtra and remained a witness to the destruction of her family.
That idea of blindness could have provided a strong foundation for a modern thriller about a mother who is forced to confront a brutal world after losing her child.
Unfortunately, Gandhari doesn’t build that connection with enough depth.
Taapsee Pannu plays Bani, a mother whose five-year-old daughter disappears from a railway station in Joypurra. A violent incident following the disappearance leaves Bani temporarily blind. Her search for her daughter eventually takes her into a strange world of trafficking, folklore and performers known as Behrupas.
The setup sounds intriguing. The execution is far less convincing.
The film wants to be a revenge thriller, a crime drama, a social commentary and a mythological allegory at the same time. By the end, none of these strands gets enough attention to make the story feel complete.
Gandhari Movie Review: Story & Screenplay
Bani’s daughter goes missing during the chaos at a railway station in Joypurra. After a brutal attack, Bani loses her sight temporarily and begins searching for the child.
Her investigation leads her into the darker side of the fictional town, where a trafficking network operates beneath a layer of local rituals and folklore.
Joypurra has its own mythology surrounding Chaumukhi Maa and the demon Magarasura, who is believed to have emerged from Pataal Lok. The town is also populated by Behrupas, performers who survive by taking on different identities.
This creates an unusual backdrop for the story.
The problem is that the screenplay never establishes why these elements need to coexist.
Bani’s personal mission is straightforward: she wants her daughter back. Her anger and desperation should be the emotional engine of the film. Instead, the narrative keeps introducing mythology and symbolism without developing a meaningful relationship between those ideas and Bani’s journey.
The trafficking angle also remains frustratingly vague.
A film built around a missing child and a trafficking network needs tension, clues and escalating danger. Gandhari occasionally delivers these elements, but it rarely sustains them for long enough.
Gandhari Movie Review: Taapsee Pannu Leads From The Front
Taapsee Pannu commits fully to the physical demands of the role.
Bani’s journey requires action, confrontation and a considerable amount of physical endurance, and Pannu handles those portions convincingly. She has already shown that she can carry physically demanding action roles, and there is no lack of commitment here.
The problem lies elsewhere.
The emotional dimension of Bani never feels as strong as it should.
A mother searching desperately for her missing five-year-old daughter should create an almost immediate emotional connection. Yet the film struggles to make that desperation consistently palpable.
Ishwak Singh is dependable as Bani’s husband, but the character is not given enough material to develop beyond the basic requirements of the story.
The supporting cast is considerably more impressive on paper than in execution. Mita Vashisht, Swastika Mukerjee, Chhaya Kadam, Prashant Narayanan and Chandan Roy are all capable performers, but their characters aren’t developed sufficiently.
Jatin Sarna also appears in a role that the screenplay seems to forget as it moves ahead.
Gandhari Movie Review: Direction & Technical Aspects
Devashish Makhija’s strongest work comes during the opening section.
The railway station sequence, the disappearance, the attack and Bani’s subsequent blindness are presented with pace and intensity. These scenes establish an atmosphere of danger and give the film a strong beginning.
The trouble starts once the story enters Joypurra’s Behrupa world.
The pace slows, the investigation becomes less engaging and the trafficking storyline remains insufficiently explained. The film keeps hinting at something larger without giving the audience enough information to understand the mechanics of the world.
The climax then moves in the opposite direction. Instead of allowing the various threads to reach satisfying conclusions, the film races through its final confrontations.
The result is a narrative that feels like two different films competing for space.
One is a dark folklore-driven story involving Chaumukhi Maa, Magarasura and the Behrupas. The other is a conventional revenge thriller about a mother taking on a trafficking network.
Neither side gets enough room to dominate.
The film’s timeline and social setting also remain unclear. The absence of modern technology in several sequences initially makes the viewer wonder whether the story is set decades earlier. Later details make that reading equally confusing.
The background score attempts to strengthen the folk-horror atmosphere, but it doesn’t consistently create the tension or unease that the setting demands.
Gandhari Movie Review: The Mahabharata Connection Doesn’t Work
This is where the film’s biggest conceptual problem lies.
The title Gandhari suggests that the Mahabharata character will have a meaningful connection to Bani’s story.
Instead, the connection largely revolves around blindness.
Gandhari chose to cover her eyes after marrying Dhritarashtra. Bani’s circumstances also involve blindness. But beyond that basic visual and thematic similarity, the screenplay doesn’t build a substantial parallel between the two women.
That makes the title feel more symbolic than essential.
The film could have explored the idea of choosing not to see, being forced not to see, or discovering the truth after years of metaphorical blindness. It could have connected Bani’s personal journey with Gandhari’s complicated relationship with family, loyalty and destruction.
Instead, the mythology mostly remains a surface-level layer.
That weakens what could have been one of the film’s most interesting ideas.
Gandhari Movie Review: Dialogues & Writing
The writing frequently reaches for dramatic, philosophical statements, but some of them feel more self-conscious than organic.
The film wants its characters to sound profound, yet the dialogue often draws attention to the writing rather than deepening the characters.
This becomes particularly noticeable when Bani and her husband discuss the masks people wear in society. The idea fits the film’s Behrupa metaphor, but the execution feels too deliberate.
The larger issue is that the screenplay keeps telling us that Bani’s story is significant without giving her enough meaningful choices to demonstrate that transformation.
Her rage is established.
Her loss is established.
Her mission is established.
But the progression between those emotional stages isn’t developed with enough precision.
Gandhari Movie Review: What Works
The film does have some effective elements.
The opening sequence is tense and disturbing. Taapsee Pannu’s physical performance is convincing, and Devashish Makhija creates an intriguing visual world around Joypurra.
The decision to place a conventional revenge story inside a fictional town built around folk traditions is also interesting in theory.
There are moments when the film feels like it could become something genuinely distinctive.
Unfortunately, those moments don’t develop into a consistently engaging narrative.
Gandhari Movie Review: What Doesn’t Work
The biggest problem is the screenplay.
The film combines elements familiar from women-led action thrillers, crime dramas and revenge stories, then adds Mahabharata imagery and local folklore on top.
The individual ingredients aren’t necessarily bad. The problem is how loosely they are connected.
The murder and trafficking investigation lacks urgency. The mythology doesn’t become an important part of the character journey. Bani’s emotional transformation remains incomplete, and the supporting characters are left without meaningful arcs.
The final act attempts to tie everything together quickly, which makes the conclusion feel rushed rather than earned.
Most importantly, the film’s central metaphor never becomes as powerful as its title suggests.
Gandhari Movie Review: Last Words
Gandhari has the framework of an intense mother-driven revenge thriller, and Taapsee Pannu gives the role everything she can physically.
But the film needed a much more focused screenplay.
The Mahabharata reference could have given the story a deeper layer about blindness, complicity, grief and revenge. Instead, it largely remains a title and a visual idea.
Devashish Makhija creates an interesting world and gets the opening stretch right, but the narrative loses momentum once it enters its folklore-heavy second half.
There is a good thriller somewhere inside Gandhari, but the writing keeps pulling it in different directions.
Rating: 1.5/5 stars.
FAQs About Gandhari
1. Is Gandhari worth watching?
Gandhari may appeal to viewers who enjoy dark revenge thrillers and women-led action films, but its uneven screenplay and unclear genre make it an easy skip for viewers looking for a tightly written thriller.
2. Who stars in Gandhari?
Gandhari stars Taapsee Pannu, Ishwak Singh, Mita Vashisht, Swastika Mukerjee, Chandan Roy and Prashant Narayanan.
3. Where can you watch Gandhari?
Gandhari is available to stream on Netflix.
4. What is Gandhari about?
Gandhari follows Bani, played by Taapsee Pannu, whose five-year-old daughter goes missing. After a violent incident leaves Bani temporarily blind, she enters the dangerous underworld of a fictional town while searching for her child.
5. What is the rating of Gandhari?
Gandhari receives 1.5 out of 5 stars in this review for its promising premise, strong opening and Taapsee Pannu’s committed performance, despite its inconsistent writing and execution.
