‘The Girlfriend’ Movie Review: An Important, Introspective Relationship Drama

Rahul Ravindran’s The Girlfriend is a straight shooter. But not really in the in-your-face exaggeration that we’re used to seeing in relationship dramas. It shows us pieces of truth scattered in the middle of various distractions — in this case, the overwhelming love of a jock type engineering student (Dheekshith Shetty), who falls for the timid Lit kid (Rashmika Mandanna), serves as a backdrop. In the middle of all the buzzy moments of young love (like the intimacy of watching a movie or sharing lunch), if we look closely, we see the ugly truths, perhaps reflecting the truth many of us have witnessed in relationships. But the filmmaker forces us to pick up these pieces for ourselves, rather than forcing them on us. This simmering, introspective nature of The Girlfriend is one of the many reasons the Telugu film is compelling. 

The film primarily revolves around two characters, Bhooma (Rashmika Mandanna) and Vikram (Dheekshith Shetty), and it’s easy to see why this choice was made. The film really takes the time to delve into what makes them tick. They go much beyond the extrovert-boyfriend-introvert-girlfriend tags, showing us the depths of their characters, and eventually their choices. When Vikram belittles Bhooma’s achievement, we register disgust, but we also understand how his upbringing has a part to play in his thinking. When Bhooma grinds her teeth and lets Vikram walk all over her, we don’t question her because the film deems it important to show us her parental neglect. In a delicate scene, we see a young Bhooma being made responsible for her father’s emotional well-being. This trauma spills into her adulthood, where caring for the men in her life becomes her entire identity, even as her own mental health unravels.

Like Prabhu Ram Vyas’s Lover (2024), which kicked off a dialogue about the micro-aggressions that women often face in relationships, The Girlfriend shines a light on a grossly unequal relationship that blossoms between two people with emotional and parental baggage. The duo couldn’t be more different from each other; Bhooma is timid and would much rather be holed up in her dorm reading Virginia Woolf, while Vikram is confident and happily hero-coded, thrashing people and taking it upon himself to “protect” the women of his college from distress. Her type is big library books, and his type is, bluntly put, his mother. In fact, a comparison with his mother comes up in the first conversation he has with Bhoomi, a red flag that she quietly intercepts as a dangerous pick-up line. But she’s pulled into the relationship regardless. And the dad-shaped hole in her heart perhaps explains her choices.

The Girlfriend, led skilfully by Mandanna and Shetty, might be about toxic relationships and revolve around a conventional heteronormative couple with an alpha-beta equation, but it always makes sure to keep its characters accountable. Anu Emmanuel plays Durga, the college diva who has her eyes set on Vikram. But she’s written with surprising dimension, nudging us to forget all the other man-eating tropes we’ve seen in cinema before. Her friendship with Bhooma is sweet, and we wish other such characters around these women were written with the same thought.

The film has a lot of things to say about many things, and the result is largely organic. Like when we see Bhooma meet Vikram’s mother for the first time (Rohini plays the role to an eerie effect), the puzzle finally fits in her head. But it is when it really goes a step ahead to spell things out for us that it borders on the side of excessive. Bhooma’s encounter with Rohini, for instance, is captured right in front of a mirror, a brilliant metaphor of their lives converging. But the film fleshes out this metaphor and doubles down on it, losing the intended effect.

We experience this dissonance quite a bit through the film, up until the climax. But through all of the warts, the writing stays strong. It doesn’t advocate virtue signalling, and neither does it place the onus on women to fix men. We need movies that don’t force women to justify their reasons for a breakup, even when the man is clearly in the wrong (a common plot point that plagues most films today). Her choice should be reason enough, and The Girlfriend gets that.