Vidya Balan chews on a cough drop during a particularly tense district coordination meeting in the middle of Amit Masurkar’s Sherni, and it’s a small thing, but it bugged me because she never actually finishes the lozenge or leaves it on the table; it just vanishes between cuts. Bollywood movies usually prefer their bureaucrats to be shouting caricatures or weeping saints, yet here we get administrative exhaustion rendered in slow motion. Mukul Chadda plays her husband, a guy who works remotely and peppers his wife's grim evenings with unsolicited cooking advice and spreadsheet optimisation tips. They live in a rented government quarter that always smells faintly of damp cardboard and stale tea. It’s an environment built from beige tiles and fluorescent tube flicker, where nobody raises their voice above a conversational murmur even when discussing mauled livestock and missing forest rangers.

Masurkar previously made Newton, which walked a very careful satirical tightrope across an election booth in the Chhattisgarh jungle, but here the register drops down several notches into something much dustier and more patient. The screenplay, credited to Yashoo Malhotra, refuses to manufacture false momentum out of a story that naturally wants to sink into the mud. You get long stretches of jeep rides over corrugated dirt roads where the sound design captures every loose bolt rattling inside the chassis. The cinematography by Rangarajan Ramabadran avoids the usual National Geographic tourist glamour that usually poisons depictions of Indian wildlife reserves. Everything looks slightly washed out by humidity, filtered through a permanent afternoon haze that makes every leaf look like it’s coated in fine red dust. Even the lighting inside the forest division office feels accurate to government frugality, casting uneven greenish shadows across piles of untended paperwork that have been sitting on wooden desks since the nineties.

Balan plays Vidya Vincent, a newly promoted Divisional Forest Officer who has inherited a territorial mess involving a tigress and her cubs wandering dangerously close to local agricultural settlements and sprawling local limestone quarries. She carries herself with the stiff posture of someone who knows she was given this posting because nobody else wanted to deal with the political fallout. There are no grand monologues delivered to the camera, nor are there any sudden emotional breakdowns in the rain. When local politicians and rival hunting consultants start breathing down her neck, she just blinks slowly and asks for their permits in writing. It’s a performance built entirely out of withheld energy and quiet resistance against men who pat her shoulder and call her madam while actively undermining every directive she issues. Vijay Raaz shows up as Hassan, a veteran zoologist whose resignation has curdled into a quiet, functional cynicism. Raaz doesn't have to do much heavy lifting because his face already tells the entire history of an underfunded department that has been losing this war against corporate encroachment for thirty years. Their dynamic lacks the sparky friction of standard procedural dramas; instead, it feels like two tired colleagues waiting for a bus that is already two hours late in 40-degree heat.

There is a recurring background score featuring sparse acoustic guitar strums and distant woodwinds that occasionally leans a bit too hard into the environmentalist moodiness, reminding us that nature is suffering. It’s not great, not bad, just there, taking up space when the ambient sounds of crickets and diesel engines would have done the heavy lifting just as well. The supporting cast is packed with local stage actors and non-professionals who bring a lived-in texture to the village council scenes. When a local MLA played by Brijendra Kala shows up to demand the immediate capture of the big cat because local election season is looming, Kala delivers his threats with the easy, practiced charm of a man who has eaten too many subsidized samosas at government functions. The tension in these rooms never comes from physical violence. It comes from the slow, bureaucratic strangulation of common sense by men who view the jungle merely as an untapped inventory of timber and mineral wealth waiting to be extracted.

Hindi films rarely know what to do with ecological collapse unless they can slap a loud moral on the poster or turn the animal into a slasher villain straight out of a creature feature. Sherni avoids these traps by treating the tigress less as a symbol and more as an inconvenient variable in a complex equation involving cattle compensation claims, disputed land titles, and local superstitions. The villagers aren't presented as noble guardians of the earth nor are they bloodthirsty monsters; they are just terrified people trying to harvest their sugarcane while sharing a fence with an apex predator. If you want a more operatic, breathless survival thriller, something closer to the relentless pacing of Neill Blomkamp's District 9, this might feel practically glacial. Yet that deliberate lack of narrative urgency is precisely what gives the film its strange, hypnotic weight. The ending doesn't offer any clean resolutions or sweeping legislative victories because the machinery of state bureaucracy doesn't work that way. The tigress moves through the trees like a ghost, leaving behind paw prints in the soft mud that will be washed away by the first real monsoon rain, leaving the humans to go back to their desks.