‘Bad Girl’ Filmmaker Varsha Bharath and Actor Anjali Sivaraman Address Backlash: ‘Surprising That People Have Such A Huge Problem With It...’

‘Bold’, ‘daring’ and ‘refreshing’: that’s how filmmaker Pa. Ranjith described Bad Girl (2025) after watching it recently. With the weight of filmmakers Vetrimaaran and Anurag Kashyap behind it, just the trailer of Varsha Bharath’s directorial debut has already ruffled a few feathers.

Bharath, who’s been assisting Vetrimaaran since graduating college in 2011, now steps into the spotlight with a film that not only challenges convention, but also signals Tamil cinema’s long-overdue return to human dramas — a genre it has all but forgotten. Premiering at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) later this week, it’s set to be a groundbreaking debut.

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Starring actor Anjali Sivaraman in the lead role, Bad Girl follows the life of Ramya, a teenage Brahmin girl navigating the turbulent waters of love and desire, lust and shame, rebellion and liberation. Based in Chennai, India, this coming-of-age story draws heavily from the writer-director’s own experiences, though it is in no way autobiographical.

“It's about things I’ve seen and felt… a collective experience of a generation from a certain class and section of society,” reveals Bharath. “When you grow up in a middle-class household, you go to schools where you are subjected to ridiculous things, like boys and girls sitting on the same bench considered a punishment.”

But it’s not a story about struggle. “There are gender-based issues, but the protagonist is not coming from a place of oppression or angst. It's just growing up stuff, you know?” Bharath grounds the narrative in the universal sense of alienation, a thought Sivaraman echoes. The actor notes, “Ramya is very relatable, not just to me, but to so many women in the country who grew up with a certain set of norms and traditions.”

The director adds that given all the online outrage right now, “It may seem like [the film] has a lot to do with a [particular] community, but it's not. You could tell the story in any milieu; it's just that I've chosen a space that I'm most familiar with.”

The Hollywood Reporter India sits down with the director and lead actor to unpack the film's journey, discuss its evolution, the controversy and everything in between.

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Varsha Bharath’s Response to the Backlash

For many, the trailer of the film felt like an attack on a particular section of society, sparking calls for a boycott and wave of angry tweets. Critics accused the director and producers of unfairly targeting the community — an allegation that both Bharath and Sivaraman firmly deny.

“In my head, it's not a sensitive topic because we all live in our little woke bubbles where we're surrounded by people who think and talk like us,” Bharath says. “When people told me there's likely to be backlash for this, I did not take it very seriously, to be honest.” But following all the social media outrage — just a day after she joined Instagram — she re-watched the trailer to understand the root of the problem. But Bad Girl, in her opinion, is a simple human drama set against a backdrop, “because we don't live in a caste-less society and you have to root a character somewhere. It's surprising that people have such a huge problem with it…”

Having said that, Bharath does realise that the mere mention of women smoking or drinking angers the conservatives. “It's such a big part of so many of our lives that it’s impossible to hide at this point. I don't see any way around this except to actually just tell our stories and get them used to it,” she adds, though all the unpleasantness has tempted the director to take a break from social media.

For Sivaraman, a Tamil girl who embodied the character, this debate didn't cross her mind at all when she took on the role. “It's a story about a girl going through the motions of life. This is something that any person from any background would go through; it has absolutely no relation to [the addressed] subjects in my mind.”

Finding Her Own Voice

Despite the criticism that comes with breaking away from the norms of Tamil cinema, the debutant director never once considered making her film in English. “A lot of the dialogues are in English because it’s set in a metro city, but my first language is Tamil and it’s the language that I always wanted to make movies in,” she believes, adding that she had to root her movie in a cultural set-up she was familiar with.

Having spent over a decade in Tamil cinema, much of it working closely with Vetrimaaran, Bharath has been immersed in the gritty, action-oriented, male-dominated worlds he’s known for. Yet, she decided to go in an entirely different direction for her debut film. “Learning happens subconsciously as an assistant director; I was thrown into the battlefield without any preparation,” she recalls. “But when I made the film and people watched the cut, a lot of them said my edit was just like his. That came as a huge surprise, because content-wise it's as different as it could be.”

Sivaraman adds, “It is Varsha’s first time doing this, so you'd expect a little bit of imitation [of Vetrimaaran’s style] here and there, but there was none; she was authentically herself.”

The actor also recalls the one scene in Bad Girl that was directed by Vetrimaaran himself. “It was a little more of an action-oriented scene in the film,” she says. “When you meet Vetri sir, he is the most calm, serene and soft-spoken person, and his style of cinema is so contrasting to his personality. His vision is always clear, so it was super easy to work with him.”

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Though Bharath initially pitched Bad Girl to a streaming platform, it didn’t materialise. That’s when Vetrimaaran stepped in to produce the film himself. “Pre-lockdown, I had gone to meet him one day. He asked me what I was working on and it was just a germ of an idea at that point, but he said it was likely to translate into a film soon,” she recalls. “Generally, when I tell him my ideas, he finds them interesting, but doesn’t think they could become films!” she adds with a laugh.

And when Anurag Kashyap came down to shoot for Viduthalai Part 2 (2024), Vetrimaaran was the one who brought him on-board. Despite only having half the film ready at that point, Kashyap was full of praise. “He said that it was the best film he'd watched in a long time," Bharath reminisced. “When you get that kind of validation, you watch the film through their lens, and realise what is working and what is not. We removed all the repetitive bits, and that's the copy that we're going to screen at Rotterdam now.”

A Dream Debut

Premiering one’s debut film at an international film festival like IFFR is no small feat. And Sivaraman is over the moon. “I've watched bits here and there, but this is going to be the first time watching the full movie, and on the big screen at that!” Bharath shares the feeling, saying she’s especially glad it’s happening at Rotterdam since it's known to be “chill and filmmaker-friendly.”

Bharath also credits Sivaraman for making the film what it is today, “There were actors whom I thought would be perfect and commercially viable, but they just wanted the film to be modified in a way that didn’t make sense to me.” She adds, “Down south, a lot of actors are extremely conservative and playing a character who is outspoken would mean that male heroes may not want to cast them anymore. They need to hold on to their homely, good-girl image which is a huge part of their market value.”

On the other hand, she immediately hit it off with Sivaraman, who had starred in projects like Class (2023), Cobalt Blue (2022) and Chakravyuh – An Inspector Virkar Crime Thriller (2021) by then.

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“After my screen test in Chennai, Varsha immediately said, ‘We have found Ramya.’ It was fun, but to make your vision come to life, you have to be a bit particular about how you want it to be represented. Varsha had three different cinematographers for each phase of Ramya's life,” Sivaraman recalls, adding that the rest of the cast, especially Hirudu [Haroon] and Sashank [Bomireddy] ensured she had a good time.

Besides Sivaraman, Bharath is excited to have brought Amit Trivedi on board; Bad Girl marks the composer’s Tamil film debut. “I'm not just saying this because it's my movie, but I don't remember the last time I listened to an album and every song is not only hit material, but also extremely soulful,” Bharath gushes, thanking Kashyap who got Trivedi on board.

Ahead of the premiere, the director reveals their plans for a theatrical release right after the Tiger competition, IFFR’s trademark event which celebrates the innovative and adventurous spirit of up-and-coming filmmakers from all over the world.

“It is planned to have a theatrical release, but ultimately it will end up on OTT platforms also where women can watch it from the safety of their homes. Even in Chennai, which is a relatively safe city, I have felt unsafe while watching the hyper-testosterone movies in theatres; you tend to feel the need to cover up because the energy is just a little weird. I want Bad Girl to be accessible so the women can watch it." Sivaraman, too, wants women to feel empowered. She adds, “I'm also really, really excited for my parents to watch it. I grew up watching my mom [singer Chitra Iyer] in the industry…”

For Bharath, Bad Girl simply fills a long-standing gap in Tamil cinema. “In Hindi, you still have human dramas, but in Tamil it's been only commercial big hero movies for the past 15 years. This wasn’t the case in the 80s and 90s — we grew up on family dramas.” Since there was nothing like it on screens anymore, the debutant director decided to make it herself.