What Is The Story About?
Performances?
Bhumi Pednekar is effective as Vaishali Singh, though she doesn’t quite get the hang of the Bihari dialect. Her restrained performance covers up the flaw though. Sanjay Mishra is superb as Bhaskar Sinha, Vaishali’s comrade-in-arms.
Aditya Shrivastava is suitably menacing as Bansi Sahu. Sai Tamhankar as DIG Jasmeet Gaur is efficient. Durgesh Kumar, as Vaishali’s informer Gupta ji, shines in yet another outing after his Banrakas in Prime Video series ‘Panchayat’.
Analysis?
Bhakshak will go down in cinematic history as yet another film that failed the classic script-to-screen test. In other words, Bhakshak is the classic case of a script that promises a lot on paper, but fails to reach the potential of that promise when actually executed.
The movie is inspired from the real-life horror that unraveled at a state-run girls’ shelter home in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur. Details of the rampant sexual abuse of inmates at the home had hogged headlines back then (in 2018). The case had been a talking point for weeks on end, keeping the media on their toes with its coverage. Sadly, this movie on the same case has nothing in it to make it a talking point even for a day, let alone for weeks.
The premise is hard-hitting – the scenes at the shelter are heart-rending. To its credit, Bhakshak never once tries to milk the sexual abuse part of the story for cheap titillation. The scenes are handled with zero exploitation of the situation. There’s not a single shot that shows the actual sexual abuse of the girls. The abuse is only conveyed through talk and suggestive sequences.
However, several cringey sequences do make their way into the narrative, making Bhakshak look like crude filmmaking instead of the polished fare one expects from Netflix – the drunken dance of the perpetrators of the crime, for instance. Honestly, it looks like a scene straight out of a B-grade movie of the eighties.
Vaishali Singh’s investigation into the sexual abuse is so full of clichés that one wonders how it passed muster with the makers. Most of her supposed passion for her craft and her unrelenting hunt for the truth is only conveyed through words – we never see any of it in action. In fact, the whole runtime of the movie is full of talk – copious and cringey; there’s too much reliance on tell, not show.
That is the reason why the storytelling fails to make any kind of impact. There’s never any sense of urgency in the narrative – the bedrock of any good investigative crime drama, which Bhakshak proclaims to be. Loopholes abound – if Sudha the cook can escape from the shelter so easily, what’s stopping the rest of the girls from doing so? Why are the people who conducted the social audit in the first place missing from the scene totally? And why is no other media channel interested in covering the explosive news? It’s all a bunch of contrived scenarios in the movie.
The good bits in the movie are few and far between. The scenes between Vaishali and Bhaskar at the one-room, two-person Koshish news channel are fun to watch. Likewise with their interactions with Durgesh Kumar’s Guptaji. The latter acts like the voice of conscience for Vaishali Singh’s character. As a bonus, he lights up the screen whenever he’s in the frame.
To sum it up, Bhakshak could have been a landmark film, had it so desired. Sadly, it settles for far little – a clichéd drama that’ll be forgotten sooner rather than later.
Music And Other Departments?
Highlights?
None worth mentioning
Drawbacks?
Clichéd plot
Poor characterisations
Loopholes
Too much talk
Unimpactful storytelling
Did I like it?
Not much
Do I recommend it?
Only as a one-time watch
Bhakshak Movie Review by Binged Bureau