In this review, Saibal Chatterjee finds Devashish Makhija’s Gandhari an ambitious but deeply flawed thriller, where Taapsee Pannu’s committed performance cannot rescue an uneven script weighed down by contrivance and missed potential.

Coming from Devashish Makhija, Gandhari is a massive letdown. If anybody has gone missing in this missing-girl-and-distressed-mother thriller, it is the director of Ajji, Bhonsle and Joram.

Gandhari has neither the grit nor the sledgehammer impact that anything Makhija does usually has. Even if one were to compare it with more standard fare – films like Mom and Maatr or a series like Mai: A Mother’s Revenge – it would still only be a pale shadow.

The Netflix film, scripted and produced by Kanika Dhillon and starring Taapsee Pannu (in her umpteenth collaboration with the screenwriter), is an awkward mishmash of inchoate elements rather than the humdinger that an abduction-and-rescue drama such as this should have been.

Taapsee Pannu – her character goes blind due to trauma and injury – strives to find her way around. It is a struggle that she deals with ably enough, but when she does manage to step into areas that promise depth and shafts of light, the narrative arc opts for contrivances that hold little water.

Joypurra’s Mythology Never Comes Alive

Gandhari is set in a fictional Bengal town, Joypurra, whose presiding deity is Chaumukhi Devi, a goddess with faces on all four sides. The town is defined by a square named after her, a community of Bahurupis, who make a living by impersonating gods and animals, and the legend of an all-devouring demon, Magrasur.

The horrors of the present day and the terrifying myths of the past sit side by side in Joypurra. The parallels sought to be drawn between reality and legend are laboured.

Nobody in Joypurra is what he or she appears to be. Some faces here are hidden behind disguises, others behind a veneer of amiability.

Under the coastal town is a web of tunnels that helps a gang named Blackhole run a child sex trafficking racket. One face in Joypurra is, until the climax, only a voice. It belongs to the gang lord who is all set to send a consignment of kidnapped girls across the border. The heroine has to find the man and his underlings before it is too late.

Mystery, Twists and Familiar Contrivances

The stentorian voice oozes evil. It is easy to tell who the actor is, but the face behind the rasping tone isn’t revealed until the climactic face-off erupts between the villain and Bani (Pannu), searching for her five-year-old daughter.

That about sums up Gandhari. The menacing voice-and-hidden-face device mirrors the generic mystery. The film telegraphs pretty early what exactly is going on and, worse, where all of it is going to end up.

If not exactly, or entirely, predictable, Dhillon’s script relies overly on twists and turns that tumble out betwixt the acts of apparently benign individuals and the not-so-grand reveals that expose the ulterior motives of those very people.

The aggrieved mother takes upon herself the rescue mission with some help from her husband, Gokul (Ishwak Singh), who, because he is not the star of the show, plays second fiddle and, at one point, even falls foul of the female protagonist.

Strong Performers, Weak Execution

Dhillon invests a great deal in the world-building and tends to overplay her hand. The director, working in pure gun-for-hire style, does what he can to lend authenticity to the setting but stops short of stamping his imprimatur on the film.

Bengali sentences are sprinkled across the film, and not all the actors get them right. Storefront and road signs in that language make things worse – much of it seems to have been put up by people who can only draw the letters, not read and write them as they should.

Filmed in a Maharashtra town, Gandhari transplants a UP-Bihar crime-infested boondocks template upon itself but then struggles to take it forward in a way that could be deemed convincing. Gandhari is more chaotic tailspin than genuine narrative spin.

Law enforcement is conspicuous by its absence in Joypurra. Girls have been vanishing without a trace from the bus station, dhobi ghat and railway station with alarming frequency, but the policemen are clueless. The cops charged with protecting the town are not only pathetically inept, they are also criminally apathetic and unabashedly in cahoots with the law-breakers.

The child sex traffickers hiding in the town’s underbelly are led by that venom-spewing face that the audience isn’t allowed to see. He isn’t nameless, though. His men call him Dada Bhai.

Blindsided by the unspeakable evil that the gang unleashes, Bani, who early in life was a blindfolded tightrope walker, is supple, fleet-footed and acrobatic enough to overcome any disability.

To get to the bottom of the truth, an anti-human trafficking unit officer, Kabir (Jatin Sarna), arrives in Joypurra. His investigation never moves to the centre of the stage. This is a female-led actioner, so the sleuth can go only so far and no further.

Pannu is in nearly every scene and has her moments. The supporting actors – Ishwak Singh, Mita Vashisht, Swastika Mukherjee, Chhaya Kadam and Chandan Roy – are wasted in varying degrees.

But that is hardly surprising. Gandhari is itself a wasted opportunity.