Bhakshak Review: Bhumi Pednekar Powers this Flawed but Outspoken Social Drama

Director: Pulkit

Writers: Jyotsana Nath, Pulkit

Cast: Bhumi Pednekar, Aditya Srivastava, Sanjay Mishra, Sai Tamhankar, Durgesh Kumar

Duration: 135 mins

Streaming on: Netflix

Bhumi Pednekar is one of the more significant actors working in mainstream Hindi cinema. She has steadily fashioned a career of progressive socio-political identity. Not all of it is sure-footed or successful, but her craft is driven by a keen awareness of the world around her. It’s a voice of calibrated dissent, composed of two distinct parts: The women she plays (Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015), Lust Stories, Saand Ki Aankh (2019), Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare (2019), Badhaai Do (2022), Thank You For Coming (2023), and the stories she chooses (Sonchiriya (2019), Afwaah, Bheed (2023)). Bhakshak, directed by Pulkit (Bose: Dead/Alive (2017)), combines these two parts to form a disruptive whole. 

Pednekar plays Vaishali Singh, an intrepid small-town reporter who pursues her passion against the wishes of a chauvinistic family. The story she chooses is inspired by the Muzaffarpur shelter-home case, where a former legislator and his aides were convicted for the sexual assault of several girls at a facility run by a state-funded non-governmental organisation (NGO). The result is far from perfect, but there's something to be said about the hidden convictions of the film. 

A Story Rooted in Facts

Bhakshak (which translates to “predator”) is designed as an underdog journalism movie. It very much speaks to the crumbling Fourth Estate of today. The chronology is understandable – and familiar. Disillusioned by the moral shallowness of national news outlets, Vaishali runs a ramshackle local channel that asks difficult questions and covers the systemic rot of Bihar. Along with a crabby cameraman named Bhaskar (a reliable Sanjay Mishra), she tries to hold the government accountable – except nobody watches their channel. 

When Vaishali’s informer offers her a buried audit report about discrepancies at a children’s shelter home in a neighbouring town, she starts to probe. Her investigation puts them on collision course with sinister MLA and lynchpin, Bansi Sahu (Aditya Srivastava), whose dark ‘business’ is shielded by friends in the ruling party. Her path becomes increasingly complicated. Vaishali’s life and family are threatened; she hits roadblocks involving cover-ups and vested interests; she struggles to find willing witnesses and accomplices. Yet, she digs deeper, broadcasting the case daily while hoping to drum up the required support to punish the perpetrators. 

The strength of Bhakshak is that it resists easy answers. Vaishali’s frustration is that she can’t take the law into her own hands – she must temper her activism with fact-finding rigour. Even the arrival of the region’s first female DSP (Sai Tamhankar) unfolds as a false dawn; her hands, too, are tied by procedural red tape. The film often teases with massy solutions – like the possibility of the channel’s videos going viral – before debunking them. Vaishali has to work within an isolated system to expose it; there is no social media release, no Youtube reach, no crowd-pleasing miracle or urban saviour. At most, there’s some comic trickery: Bhaskar ‘performs’ to fool a high-placed minister and trigger a rift in the male-dominated group. But this scene also features a ‘Whatsapp University’ joke (a man advises Bhaskar to not keep his cellphone near his heart), leaving little doubt about the film’s ideological sass and sense of place. At one point, a lawyer yells at Vaishali that the reason he keeps quiet is because he wants to stay safe – at once revealing the link between middle-class fear and complicity. Her husband begs her to stop poking the beast, but he also rides her scooter – sampling the courage of an official ‘Press’ sticker – when she’s away. 

Spelling Out Subtext

Despite having the body of a journalism film, though, Bhakshak has the bleeding heart of a vigilante drama. Vaishali’s heroism is laced with impassioned speeches and PSA-level awakenings. An anthem called “Hum shamil hai (we are all responsible)” spells out the subtext of modern culpability and privilege. A climactic monologue, which breaks the fourth wall and asks the Facebook generation to do better, brings to mind Jawan (2023), the mega-scale social thriller also produced by Shah Rukh Khan's Red Chillies Entertainment. (Jawan, too, featured explicit nods to real-world scandals, with its vigilantism defined by the excesses of action cinema). In terms of commentary, some of these broad strokes work – Vaishali's profession feeds the loud idealism of her journey. Her self-righteousness is shaped by both what she does and who she is. Her channel is called Koshish (meaning “effort”), which makes her look like an updated version of the colourful anchors played by Khan and Juhi Chawla in Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (2000). 

But some of the narrative grit is undone by the genre’s on-the-nose tone. There are times when Vaishali sounds like someone written from the outside; she's enlightened for effect. Her resilience is readymade because she's the protagonist. Her husband is a stock chauvinist – scolding her for coming home late and not cooking him dinner – so that she can school him about equality and sexism; his transformation is sudden and unconvincing, where he acts like a chastised child reciting an essay. The film’s portrayal of evil, too, is steeped in caricature: An actor of Aditya Srivastava’s calibre is reduced to a smoking-and-snarling cartoon villain. The film opens with a scene that revolves around a writhing girl, chilli powder and a man cackling with sick glee. The oppression is so blatant that it's almost exploitative. The story might've packed a greater punch had it followed Vaishali's perspective, thereby allowing the viewer to imagine, see and uncover the crimes in tandem with her.

The little details lose some shape, too. For instance, when a former inmate narrates her experience, the flashback is strange. One of the shots begins with two men talking before she enters the frame, which robs her memory of a point of view: How does the narrator know of a chat that occurs in her absence? Furthermore, the girl discovers the skeletons in this ghastly closet over the course of a single night. She slinks across corridors in what feels like a theme-park-style House of Horrors, with every door opening to an incriminatory image staged for her eyes. It's all too curated and convenient, leaving little spontaneity in a film that's about cultural ghosts and shadows. Bhaskar also asks basic questions (“Why doesn't she speak up?”) so that Vaishali can literalize the issues in a Made-In-Heaven-esque manner. The film is so determined to say something important that it often second-guesses its own language. It can't be accused of sensationalism, but there are hints of a telecast that doesn't quite trust us to read (between) the lines. 

Fortunately, Bhumi Pednekar’s unadorned spirit rescues the movie from the irony of its own treatment. Vaishali exists in more of an op-ed mould, which allows Pednekar to blur the lines between character and performer. The film refuses to deliver a victorious message; it knows that India wasn’t (re)built in a day. Her uneven diction and sarcastic Ravish-Kumar-style reportage become secondary to the notion of an independent journalist seeking direct contact with the country she covers. In a not-so-parallel universe, she'd be the subject of a pressing documentary called While We Watched. But Vaishali is non-fiction masquerading as finite fiction; she remains an endless life parading as a story. Watch her long enough, and Bhakshak becomes a timely nod to a nation stranded at the crossroads of mythmaking and democracy.