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Sherni movie review: Vidya Balan buries her star persona in the lap of nature and gripping forest politics

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 “If you pass through the jungle 100 times, you may spot a tiger once but the tiger will have seen you 99 times,” a forest official is told early in this film.

Nature is eternally poised to defend itself against human invasion with ample reasons, some of which are explored in engrossing detail in producer-writer-director Amit Masurkar’s Sherni (The Tigress). With a story and screenplay by Aastha Tiku, and dialogues by Masurkar and Yashasvi Mishra, Sherni is set in the wilds of Madhya Pradesh in the midst of simultaneous human-animal conflict and internal conflict in the Homo sapiens species between conservationists and predators.

Vidya Vincent (played by Vidya Balan) has recently been appointed as a Divisional Forest Officer when a tigress attacks a villager in her area of operation. Vidya’s team works hard to allay the community’s fears and formulate a strategy to keep them safe while also ensuring the beast’s transportation to a reserve nearby. All might have gone according to plan if it were not for an upcoming election that results in local politicians going into overdrive to stoke tensions among the people, colluding with corrupt forest officials and fostering distrust of their honest colleagues.

Vidya finds allies in the college professor Hassan Noorani (Vijay Raaz), several members of her department and poor villagers who keep vigil along with them. Their goal is to get the big cat to the national park before a hunter gets her or before she crosses paths with another innocent human.

In its initial scenes, Sherni gives the impression that it intends to carry forward Masurkar’s penchant for injecting humour into explosive situations, as he did with the rip-roaring Sulemani Keeda on debut in 2014 or with 2017’s Newton in which the eponymous hero is sent to oversee an election in a conflict zone in Chhattisgarh. The opening interaction here between Hassan and Vidya’s boss, played by the redoubtable Brijendra Kala, is hilarious, but it gradually turns out that Sherni is the most sombre of the director’s films so far.

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