Taapsee Pannu’s Gandhari has drawn a blunt review from Sukanya Verma at Rediff, which says the film’s mystery and twists do not hold together. The criticism lands on the core thriller setup, where Bani’s search for her abducted five-year-old daughter is supposed to carry the suspense.
Sukanya Verma on Gandhari
“All of Gandhari's attempts to shroud itself in mystery are laughable,” Verma wrote in the review. That line goes straight at the film’s central bargain: a kidnapping story at Joypurra railway station, a mother who loses her sight after chasing the offender, and a hunt that needs clean thriller logic to work.
Taapsee Pannu plays Bani, while Ishwak Singh plays Gokul. The review frames the setup as a race between a family crisis and the film’s own attempt to stretch uncertainty, but it argues that the writing gives away too much too early.
Blindness and Black Hole
Temporary blindness changes how Bani moves through the story, and the film leans on that limitation for tension. Verma’s review still says the mechanics are too obvious, including the recurring Black Hole gang, which reads less like a source of menace than a label the film keeps repeating.
Kanika Dhillon is credited as producer, creative producer, story, screenplay and dialogues writer, and Devashish Makhija directed Gandhari. With that much control concentrated in one creative lane, the review suggests the film should have had a tighter grip on its own mystery rather than letting the clues sit in plain sight.
Mahabharata echo fades
The film also alludes to the Mahabharata character Gandhari, but the review does not find the comparison apt. The name promises a certain moral weight and blindness motif, yet the story Verma describes is built more on kidnapping, confusion and thinly concealed answers than on a layered parallel.
The Anti Human Trafficking Unit enters the plot because the region sees regular child kidnapping and trafficking, which should give the story a harder edge. Instead, the review says the film never properly explains how Bani and Gokul get used to brand new surroundings in less than a month, and that gap leaves the thriller hanging on questions the script does not answer cleanly.
For viewers, the takeaway is simple: Gandhari is being judged less as a mystery and more as a logic test, and this review says it fails. If the film wants its blind protagonist setup to carry the suspense, it has to make the audience work for the answers — not hand them out in the open.
