Vidya Balan’s laugh in the first twenty minutes of Shakuntala Devi is the kind of sound that makes you check if your neighbor can hear your television through the wall, loud and entirely unbothered by how a woman in mid-century India was supposed to behave in a drawing room. If I'm honest, that specific cackle got on my nerves the first time it echoed across the soundstage, but by the midpoint, it became the anchor for everything director Anu Menon was trying to pull off with a script that otherwise wanted to rush through chronology like it was checking items off a grocery list. Biopics about mathematical geniuses usually make the mistake of treating numbers like glowing neon special effects or abstract art, yet Menon wisely grounds the obsession in sheer theatricality, letting the arithmetic happen off-screen while the camera stays locked on Balan's face as she calculates the cube root of a nine-digit number faster than a mainframe can boot up. The film moves through decades with the breathless pacing of a Wikipedia page edited by a very enthusiastic fan, skipping whole years of marital strife and mathematical triumphs just to get to the next sharp retort or the next brightly colored sari.

Sanya Malhotra plays Anupama, the daughter who spends half her youth trailing behind a mother treating motherhood like a secondary hobby she picked up during a layover in London, and the dynamic between the two actors saves the second act from drowning in domestic melodrama. When Malhotra has to deliver lines about feeling neglected while her mother is busy calculating pi on German television, she doesn't fall back on the usual tear-stained histrionics you usually get in Hindi movies when the generational trauma plotline kicks into high gear. She just looks tired, which is a much harder emotion to sustain on camera for two hours without looking like you need a nap. Jisshu Sengupta, playing the husband who gamely tags along for the ride while his wife becomes a global celebrity, has this wonderful, slightly bewildered expression throughout that reminds you of how bizarre the whole premise actually was, this eccentric woman traveling the globe making middle-aged men in suits feel deeply inadequate at multiplication tables. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me how the hair and makeup department aged Sengupta simply by throwing some silver paint into his sideburns while leaving his face remarkably smooth, giving him the exact aesthetic of a high school drama teacher playing a grandfather in an annual day play.

The cinematography by Keiko Nakahara leans hard into the period aesthetics without letting the frame feel like a dusty museum exhibit, splashing mustard yellows and turquoise blues across London flats and Bangalore hotel rooms with an infectious energy. There’s a particular tracking shot early on that follows Balan rushing through a crowded hotel lobby while rattling off prime numbers to a flustered BBC producer, and the camera work manages to capture the dizziness of her brain without resorting to those cheesy spinning-room effects that directors usually deploy when they want to show a character is thinking real hard. Yet the soundtrack keeps tripping over itself with these jaunty, synthesized numbers that feel imported from a completely different decade of Hindi films, signaling every emotional beat a second before the actors can even get there. Bollywood movies have always struggled with how to score a life that didn't happen in a musical theatre, and here the background score often treats a mathematical convention like a high-speed car chase, hammering the tension until the actual domestic arguments feel smaller than the music suggests.

Menon and co-writer Nayanika Mahtani are clearly fascinated by the sheer audacity of a woman who refused to make herself smaller to accommodate the fragile egos of the men running academia and households in the nineteen-sixties, and that thematic spine prevents the picture from sliding into a standard-issue inspirational Wikipedia adaptation. Shakuntala is shown as difficult, impatient, occasionally cruel, and entirely unapologetic about loving the lime-light more than she loved cooking dinner, which immediately separates her from the saintly biographical subjects that usually populate this corner of cinema. Think of how Rani Mukerji played the spirited teacher in Hichki, where every rough edge was carefully sanded down by the third reel to ensure maximum audience sympathy, and then look at how Balan is permitted to simply be irritatingly right about everything while alienating the people who love her most. That refusal to soften the protagonist makes the mother-daughter reconciliation scenes hit with genuine force when they finally arrive, because you genuinely believe these two people spent fifteen years being stubborn rather than just misunderstanding each other.

The courtroom drama that dominates the final third feels tacked on and utterly unnecessary, a relic of the compulsion to provide a neat legal climax where life only offered messy compromises and out-of-court settlements. Characters suddenly start delivering monologues about women's rights that sound less like things a stressed mother would say to a custody lawyer and more like press release drafts for the streaming platform hosting the release. Still, even when the dialogue dips into promotional territory, Balan grabs the scene by the lapels and shakes it until the artificiality falls away, reminding everyone why she remains one of the few actors working in mainstream cinema who can carry an entire biographical project on the strength of her posture alone. You stop noticing the abrupt scene transitions and the occasional flat supporting turn the moment she starts arguing about fractions with a stiff-necked bureaucrat in a boardroom. The closing credits feature footage of the real Shakuntala Devi laughing and solving equations on television, and the uncanny resemblance in posture and mischief makes you realize the actor didn't just play the part, she completely hijacked the legend and made it breathe.