Kanika Dhillon’s Gandhari, her sixth collaboration with Taapsee Pannu, springs from her own experience of motherhood, centering on how far a mother will go to protect her child. Blending mythological reinterpretation with an action-thriller frame, the film follows a blind protagonist, challenges Pannu’s typecasting, and avoids being boxed as a social-issue drama despite its strong gender undercurrents.
Kanika Dhillon returns to the thriller genre yet again with Gandhari, marking her sixth collaboration with Taapsee Pannu — a partnership that began with Anurag Kashyap's Manmarziyaan in 2018, ran through Haseen Dillruba and it's sequel Phir Aayi Haseen Dillruba, Dunki, Rashmi Rocket and now lands on Gandhari, the first film Dhillon has produced specifically for Pannu.
The trailer made headlines in the days before release, though not for reasons the team would have hoped. In an earlier interview, writer Kalyan Bandi alleged that the premise closely mirrored a story he'd written and registered in 2019; Dhillon's Kathha Pictures denied the claim, calling it baseless.
When asked where the film actually came from, Dhillon spoke about the inciting event — the moment she became a mother. "The whole emotional crux is a mother's love for her child, and how far she can go for the child's safety," Dhillon said. "That was a very new, overwhelming emotion. I wanted to pin something down around that. That was the seed of Gandhari."
Gandhari follows Bani, played by Taapsee Pannu, a mother whose young daughter Mishty is snatched off a train in the fictional town of Joypurra in West Bengal. What starts as a search quickly pulls Bani into a child-trafficking network she has to dismantle largely on her own. She loses her eyesight in the process, and is forced to hunt down the traffickers using every sense but sight.
The mythological connection followed once the core was set. "Gandhari, in the Mahabharata, has been a mother who could never actively take a stand. This time I wanted to reinterpret that — see her actually making the right decision and getting into the battlefield and fighting that war."
The idea took shape five years before release, with another two and a half years spent building the world before the shoot began.
Pannu pushed back on the idea that she keeps returning to one genre by choice. She's quick to note that despite the outward similarities, she and Dhillon have never actually repeated a genre: "I don't think Kanika and I have done pure thrillers, honestly. It's never been one specific genre with her."
The industry at large is another matter. "You won't believe the number of films I've turned down," she said. "It's become so predictable, they keep casting me for a thriller, or someone standing for a woman's right. But you can also make me do a story like this. It's a human story, across genders."
Ishwak Singh, who plays Pannu's husband, called the collaboration one he'd long waited for. "Kanika's writing is something that excites me. Some of these movies have been my favorites, Manmarziyaan onwards. And I've been a huge admirer of Taapsee's movies."
What stayed with him was how hard the material hit once he performed it on set: "That's the mark of top-notch writing, the emotion hits you so hard."
Dhillon singled out Singh's character as the one that evolved the most. "It was written a particular way, and then it evolved. We did a patch shoot after wrapping, where he brought out a different dimension I was quite happy with."
However,the physical transformation fell hardest on Pannu, whose character loses her sight mid-film. Pannu mentioned that she researched blindness as a spectrum, and was careful about not overplaying it.
"If you see a lot of films, we overdo it like a blind person isn't physically crippled. If you own it up and learn the way around it, you can weaponise it, and that gets you into corners people don't expect."
Physically, she leaned on endurance over new training: "I got myself ready for those twelve-hour shifts every day. I practice aerial yoga in real life, so I had a slight hang of what a street circus artist would do."
As the duo marks their sixth collaboration, they hope audiences take away something deeper than a message.
Gandhari premieres on Netflix on September 3.