Sherni Movie Review: The treatment of Sherni made it a different film. It is simple storytelling of a very complex matter man versus wild and their jointly exclusive survival. Few Bollywood filmmakers have tried to capture the emotional depths of human and animal relationships and race but these stories never scratched beyond the surface. Even movies such as Haathi Mere Saathi and Teri Meherbaniyan showed the animals as supporting beings and kind to the human characters and never as independent entities.
Amongst them is Vidya Vincent (Vidya Balan), a strict Divisional Forest Officer (DFO), whose clueless senior officer Bansal (Brijendra Kala) wants to get the man-eater killed with the help of the local hunter named Pintu Bhaiyya (Sharat Saxena). Then there are some local politicians involved in it and other forest department officers who don’t want to lose their hold over the issue because it may be beneficial for them during the elections.
Sherni – Official Trailer | Vidya Balan, Vijay Raaz, Neeraj Kabi
Most recent ones like The Forest or Roar pointed to the conflicts but never ever probed the possible reasons behind that. Director Amit Masurkar’s Sherni Movie is unique in this sense as it shows the involvement of different people interested in an immediate solution of the man-animal clash rather than a long-term one. Masurkar (Sulemani Keeda, Newton) identifies three to four different parties and then lets them deal with the prowling tiger somewhere in Madhya Pradesh state.
In fact, this is how the story or the narrative of the movie Sherni compels us to take every character seriously and keenly understand them. Like a fly-on-the-wall experience, you see Vidya Vincent navigating through a very tough landscape only to reach nowhere. It’s indeed a complex tale—that the government wants to save the tigers, the villagers surrounding the jungle want to use jungles for daily resources and the tigers need a fearless habitat. On top of it, local politicians want to use tigers as a trophy for their guarantee of the villagers’ protection.
Read how Vidya Balan Craft a Smart Human-Wildlife Dispute Story
Just like Newton Film, there are no villains here either. Aastha Tiku’s superb screenplay is full of ironic comments on the functioning of administration and local politicians but they all seems to be doing what they think is right for the local public at that point of situations. Their means and methods may be different but their intentions and thoughts are certainly not black.
Add a dose of subtle humour to the proceedings and you have a smooth story at your hands. It’s not the obvious kind of corruption we witness in Bollywood films. Rather it’s more about treating wildlife as an inferior species. That way, it deals with moral corruption and how it impacts decision making in crucial conditions.
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Vidya Balan again showed the willingness to take up an unconventional story and she has done it very well as usual, but the movie Sherni is a director’s film. Masurkar also showed impeccable maturity in handling a lesser-known subject. Sherni surely deserves your attention because it’s about synergy—your synergy with the surroundings and the living things.
All the primary characters are in top forms like Vidya Balan, Brijendra Kala, Vijay Raaz, Sharat Saxena, and Neeraj Kabi. They have lean-to their usual Bollywood image and get into the character of the movie completely.