Tag Archives: Mita Vashisht

Movie Review: Gandhari (2026)

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1 Star (out of 4)

Watch Gandhari on Netflix

Gandhari is what happens when someone tries to remake Kahaani without understanding what made Kahaani so special.

Gandhari writer Kanika Dhillon is no slouch at weaving together multiple plot threads, as she did in the Haseen Dillruba films. That’s what makes Gandhari‘s slapdash plot so shocking. Disjointed directing by Devashish Makhija makes the movie-watching experience all the more frustrating.

Gandhari marks Taapsee Pannu’s sixth project with Dhillon, having previously starred in those Haseen Dillruba films. This time, Pannu plays Bani, wife of Gokul (Ishwak Singh) and mother of 5-year-old Mishty (Myrah Shivan). While the family is on a trip, their train stops briefly in the town of Joypurra. A woman nabs Mishty while Bani is in the restroom and Gokul is buying snacks.

Bani chases the woman carrying Mishty across the platform, but she runs headfirst into a metal pole. The woman escapes, leaving Bani and Gokul to file a police report while also dealing with Bani’s head injury. The police are no help, and Bani’s concussion results in temporary blindness. The couple will have to find their missing daughter on their own.

Well, not entirely on their own. A federal government official named Kabir (Jatin Sarna) arrives with his assistant Sanjukta (Priti Shroff) to follow leads on a child trafficking outfit known as the Blackhole Gang, the history of which they explain in excruciating detail. Kabir and Sanjukta never interact with Bani, which is weird. It’s as if Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Fed character in Kahaani never talked to Vidya Balan’s Vidya.

In this unfamiliar town, Bani just happens to run into her adoptive mother Jhuna Amba (Mita Vashisht) from back in her days as a child acrobat. Over the next month, Jhuna Amba secretly teaches Bani how to be a blind ninja assassin.

If that sounds stupid, it’s because it is.

All of this takes place in a town where seemingly everyone is involved in this child-trafficking ring. I don’t know much about gang finances, but employing so many people in a dangerous racket and buying their secrecy seems prohibitively expensive. Some retroactive continuity meant to connect Bani’s past to the Blackhole Gang that makes the plot even more ridiculous. It’s so bad, it’s actually funny.

Pannu put a lot of physical work into preparing for this role, and it’s a shame that the script lets her down. Action scenes are shot awkwardly and edited poorly, so nothing looks as good as it could have. The acting across the board is fine, given quality of the material.

Comparisons between Gandhari and Kahaani are fair, given how much the stories overlap. Both feature women looking for a lost family member in an unfamiliar city where identities are malleable. Balan’s character in Kahaani is underestimated because she is pregnant; Pannu’s is because she is blind and “a helpless mother.” Both of their searches reach their climax during a festival honoring a protective female deity: Durga in Kahaani, Chaumukhi Devi in Gandhari.

Yet Dhillon’s story lacks all the other things that Ghosh and his co-writers got right in Kahaani: magnificent world-building, ace character development, meaningful relationships, and twists that feel surprising but believable. Gandhari‘s world-building is terrible. Fight scenes and training montages take the place of character growth. Twists and secrets are used in quantity rather than quality.

Gandhari ends with Bollywood’s clearest indicator of a lack of narrative confidence: statistics. Three slides featuring data about the number of children trafficked in India are shown onscreen — as if the audience didn’t already realize that fictional stories draw inspiration from real life, and that, without the stats, we might feel there’s an acceptable number of children allowed to be trafficked. It undermines the emotional connections we were supposed to form with victims in the story.

The last of Gandhari‘s closing slides contains a quote so nonsensical that it provides the perfect ending to this awful film: “Behind every mother is a child…taken from a mother.” Exactly.

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Movie Review: Chhorii (2021)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Chhorii on Amazon Prime

Chhorii (“Girl“) isn’t an out-and-out scare-fest, but rather a thoughtful exploration of the real threats faced by expectant mothers.

Nushrratt Bharuccha carries the film as Sakshi, a woman 8-months pregnant with her first child. She loves the kids she works with at her charity in the city, and she’s particularly keen to make sure girls are given the same opportunities as boys.

When thugs beat up her husband Hemant (Saurabh Goyal) for not paying back a loan, the couple’s driver Kajala (Rajesh Jais) offers to let them hide at his family’s home in a remote village until they can figure out a plan. This seems risky given Sakshi’s condition, but Kajala assures them that his wife Bhanno Devi (Mita Vashisht) will be there to help.

Kajala drops them off outside of a labyrinthine sugarcane field and tells them to follow the path to the house. When they find the house, Bhanno Devi is welcoming enough, but her conservatism — such as making Sakshi wait to eat until after Hemant and Kajala have finished dinner — puts modern Sakshi on the back foot.

Then there’s the fact that Hemant doesn’t advocate on her behalf in that situation. Add that to Hemant’s belief that taking Sakshi far away from her doctors to a place with no cell service is a smart idea, and it raises some red flags, at the very least regarding his situational awareness.

Sakshi gets comfortable enough with Bhanno Devi that she okays Hemant’s plan to return to the city for a few days to raise some funds. As soon as he leaves, things get weird. Bhanno Devi’s mute daughter-in-law Rani (Pallavi Ajay) shows up, bearing an angry scar across her abdomen from when she lost her own fetus. And three mischievous little boys appear to Sakshi, asking her to come play with them.

Bhanno Devi is awful to Rani and short with Sakshi when the pregnant woman brings up the three boys. The older woman only ever calls Sakshi “chhorii” (“girl”), and insists that Sakshi follow her rules without question. And don’t get Bhanno Devi started on her former sister-in-law, whom she refers to as a witch.

The supernatural aspects of Chhorii don’t take center stage until the second half of the film, but with good reason. Writer-director Vishal Furia’s story (co-written with Vishal Kapoor and based on their Marathi film Lapachhapi) emphasizes that there are a lot of threats to Sakshi’s well-being beyond ghosts and witches. As sad as it is, she can only be sure of her own devotion to the health of her unborn child. Her understandable mistake in following the judgment of Hemant and Kajala ceded a dangerous amount of control.

Sakshi makes for a satisfying horror heroine. She’s trusting, but not naive; curious, but not reckless. Bharuccha does a nice job in the lead role and plays beautifully off of the undercurrent of menace Vashisht laces into her performance as Bhanno Devi.

Chhorii is most compelling when it leans into its folktale roots. Bhanno Devi tells a parable about a crow in a poisoned tree that is as sad as it is chilling. It’s a little disappointing and unnecessary when Furia includes real-world stats on female infanticide at the end of the film. The moral of the story is already clear as can be.

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Movie Review: Good Luck Jerry (2022)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Good Luck Jerry on Hulu

The vibe of director Siddharth Sen’s debut feature Good Luck Jerry feels like a toned-down Ludo or Looop Lapeta. But trendy aesthetics can’t compensate for a disorganized screenplay and a lack of character development.

Janhvi Kapoor lends her undeniable charisma to Jerry Kumari, a young woman willing to do whatever it takes to provide for her family after her father’s death. Jerry’s mom Sharbati (Mita Vashisht) isn’t happy about her daughter’s job at a massage parlor, but the family needs the money, especially while Jerry’s younger sister Cherry (Samta Sudiksha) finishes school.

Their financial situation gets worse when Sharbati is diagnosed with lung cancer. Unable to get a loan for Sharbati’s treatment, Jerry uses a serendipitous connection to put a risky scheme into action.

While shopping at a market with Cherry, Jerry is forced by a neck-brace-wearing gangster named Timmy (Jaswant Singh Dalal) to recover a packet of drugs hidden in the men’s restroom. There are police all over the market, but they won’t suspect a young woman of carrying drugs. Jerry succeeds, and Timmy lets the sisters go. The next day, Jerry finds Timmy and convinces him to hire her as a drug runner on a permanent basis.

The new gig earns Jerry more than enough money, but it earns her enemies among the drug dealers as well. Timmy’s boss sets her up to fail with a job that’s too big to pull off — at least not without the help of her family.

In keeping with the colorful dark comedy style of movies like Ludo and Looop Lapeta, Good Luck Jerry‘s world is populated by weirdos. Jerry has to fend off romantic overtures from 40-something wannabe rapper Rinku (Deepak Dobriyal), and Cherry has her own suitor who hounds her while dressed in a groom’s attire. The criminals she meets are quirky, though not as memorable as Pankaj Tripathi’s neck-brace-wearing gangster Sattu from Ludo.

If anything, Good Luck Jerry seems like a watered-down version of other films in the same genre. It’s not as visually interesting, the characters are forgettable, and the comedy isn’t edgy enough. Also, Jerry’s final scheme seems overly complex, and the movie makes no attempt to explain how she, her mom, and her sister were able to pull it off.

Even though it’s based on the Tamil film Kolamaavu Kokila, the screenplay feels like an early draft. Jerry doesn’t grow at all; she begins and ends the movie as a woman who will do anything for her family. Sheer volume of characters — and the inflated runtime that comes with them — is treated as more important than fewer, more impactful ones. Dobriyal’s Rinku suffers particularly from this. He and Jerry don’t have much of a relationship, so including him in a climactic shootout doesn’t actually raise the stakes for Jerry. He just takes up space and screentime.

Kapoor, Sudiksha, and Vashisht share a delightful rapport and make a really cute family. Good Luck Jerry needed more of them and less of everybody else.

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