Gandhari Review – Taapsee Pannu Fights Hard But The Story Struggles To Find Its Focus

Casting - Taapsee Pannu, Ishwak Singh, Swastika Mukherjee, Chhaya Kadam, Jatin Sarna, Mita Vashisht, and Kiara Chauhan

Writer - Kanika Dhillon

Platform - Netflix

Duration - 117 minutes

Rating – 2

What would a mother be willing to do if her child was taken away from her? Gandhari begins with a question that has the potential to create an emotionally charged thriller. It brings together a missing child, a desperate mother, a sinister trafficking network and a mysterious fictional city filled with tunnels, rituals and bahurupiyas. Add Taapsee Pannu in an action-heavy role, and the ingredients seem promising. Yet, despite having several distinctive ideas at its disposal, the film struggles to turn them into a gripping and emotionally powerful whole.

Bani's world revolves around her six-year-old daughter Mishti. Along with her husband Gokul, she has built a simple family life around the child. Everything changes during a journey when Mishti is abducted. At a railway station, Bani desperately chases the woman fleeing with her daughter, only to be attacked and seriously injured near her eye. The injury leaves her temporarily blind, but the darkness she experiences is about to become much larger than a medical condition.

As Bani begins searching for Mishti, she discovers that her daughter's disappearance may be connected to something far more sinister. Joypurra, the fictional city where the story unfolds, has a troubling history of missing children, pointing towards an organised child-trafficking network. The local police response is frustratingly slow, but senior officer Kabir steps in to investigate. What begins as a mother's personal search gradually expands into a larger mystery involving crime, hidden networks and secrets buried beneath the city.

And Joypurra is easily one of the film's most interesting creations. Devashish Makhija gives the setting an eerie personality of its own. Its narrow lanes, painted faces, bahurupiyas, underground tunnels and mysterious rituals create an unsettling world that feels removed from the familiar landscape of Hindi thrillers. The connection between Bani's loss of sight and the film's larger mythology is also an intriguing idea. There is a visual and thematic possibility here that could have made Gandhari genuinely distinctive.

The title itself points towards another interesting layer. The film draws a connection between Bani and Gandhari from the Mahabharata through the recurring motif of blindness and the eyes. Gandhari chose to blindfold herself in solidarity with her husband, while Bani's darkness becomes part of her journey towards finding her daughter. It is a potentially powerful parallel, but the film doesn't explore it deeply enough. The symbolism is visible, yet the emotional and philosophical possibilities surrounding it remain largely untapped.

Taapsee Pannu, meanwhile, is clearly comfortable with the action. She has previously shown her ability to handle physically demanding roles in films such as Baby and Naam Shabana, and Gandhari gives her plenty of opportunities to fight. She carries the combat sequences with confidence, and the physicality of Bani's character suits her well.

The problem comes when the film asks her to move beyond the action and inhabit the emotional devastation of a mother who has lost her child. There are moments when she gets there, but the performance doesn't always convey the depth of Bani's anguish. Her established action-hero persona occasionally becomes more prominent than the frightened, desperate mother underneath it. The film needed us to feel her desperation before asking us to celebrate her strength.

That emotional gap becomes even more important because the relationship between Bani and Mishti is the foundation on which the entire story rests. Mishti's disappearance is supposed to be devastating, but the screenplay doesn't spend enough time establishing the mother-daughter bond before taking the child away. As a result, Bani's relentless mission can sometimes feel like a plot requirement rather than an emotional journey that the audience is experiencing alongside her.

Ishwak Singh is sincere as Gokul, but his character remains noticeably underwritten. He is also a parent dealing with the disappearance of his daughter, yet the screenplay places almost all the emotional and narrative weight on Bani. His equation with Bani feels functional rather than deeply lived-in, and the two don't get enough material to make their relationship resonate.

The supporting cast fares better in terms of making an impression, although most of them aren't given sufficient screen time. Meeta Vashishth brings an intriguing stillness to Jhunu Amba, making the character mysterious without overplaying it. Chhaya Kadam also leaves her mark, while Jatin Sarna, Chandan Roy, Swastika Mukherjee and Prashant Narayanan add credibility to the ensemble. Jatin Sarna, in particular, fits naturally into the police-investigation side of the story.

Where Gandhari begins to lose its way is in the screenplay. Kanika Dhillon has assembled several potentially compelling threads — child trafficking, a mother's search, Bani's past, a police investigation, the strange culture of Joypurra and the world of bahurupiyas. The difficulty is that the film tries to carry all of them at once. Instead of strengthening one central narrative, the screenplay keeps opening new doors.

The first half manages to maintain curiosity because the central mystery remains compelling. But as the film progresses, the story starts moving in too many directions. Flashbacks and lengthy conversations interrupt the momentum, while several revelations are explained rather than dramatically uncovered. When a mystery thriller explains its secrets through dialogue instead of allowing the audience to discover them organically, much of the suspense disappears.

The action sequences don't always help either. While the fights are technically effective and Taapsee handles them well, some are stretched beyond their usefulness. Instead of advancing Bani's emotional or investigative journey, certain sequences seem to exist primarily to demonstrate how physically capable she is. After a point, the action begins replacing the tension rather than creating it.

That is ultimately the film's central problem. Gandhari has plenty happening, but not everything happening feels equally important. New characters and pieces of information arrive whenever the narrative needs another push. The twists keep the plot moving, but they rarely deliver the kind of shock that makes you rethink what you've just seen.

The film could have been much more effective had it stayed closer to its emotional core: a mother desperately searching for her missing daughter while slowly discovering the horrifying machinery behind child trafficking. Instead, the story frequently gets distracted by its own world-building and action set pieces.

There are flashes of a much stronger film here. Joypurra is visually and conceptually fascinating. The eye and blindness motif has real potential. Taapsee brings conviction to the physical demands of the role. The supporting actors add weight wherever the screenplay allows them space. But these individual strengths never fully come together.

Gandhari is a film where the idea is arguably more exciting than the finished product. Its premise promises a dark, emotional thriller about a mother who enters an unfamiliar and dangerous world to bring her daughter home. What we get instead is an uneven combination of action, mystery, crime and mythology that struggles to maintain emotional intensity.

If you enjoy watching Taapsee Pannu in action-oriented roles, there are enough fight sequences and moments of physical intensity to keep you engaged. But if you enter expecting a deeply moving story about a mother's desperation, Gandhari may leave you wanting more. The film has darkness, danger and plenty of ideas — what it lacks is the emotional light needed to make us truly feel why Bani refuses to stop until she finds her daughter.