One of India’s most famous insurgents, Phoolan Devi has a fascinating story, one slice of which forms the basis of Richie Mehta’s “Phoolan.” Based partially on Devi’s autobiography “I, Phoolan,” Mehta’s movie follows Shekhar Kapur’s famous 1994 telling “Bandit Queen” — a more sprawling biopic, though one Devi herself rejected — but spools its political and social context around a single police encounter. That it works at all is impressive, since its back-and-forth narrative structure is, at best, haphazard.
Outlaw, feminist icon, and eventual politician, few figures in post-Independent India drum up as much furor, reverence and controversy, though you might not know it from “Phoolan” alone. Its tale of a young woman from an oppressed caste, fighting both poverty and patriarchal norms, makes her a folkloric figure, which several characters acknowledge, though rarely does Mehta’s camera capture her as such. As its title suggests, the movie plays, at times, like an attempt to uncover the lady behind the legend, but its chaotic setting rarely allows for such a detailed inquiry.
That said, the actress playing the diminutive vigilante — a remarkable Sneha Kumari — drums up just enough passion and intrigue to counterbalance this relatively rote unfurling. It begins with a man leering at a young Devi from afar before she snaps back at him, jolting the film forward to the beginnings of a police raid on a village where she’s hiding. It takes a while before the film can contextualize these events within its larger musings on caste, gender and economic oppression, which aren’t strictly necessary when introducing Devi’s armed struggle, though their absence does lead to a lack of narrative momentum.
The who, where, how and why of it all are often left to on-screen intertitles, which yank us back and forth in time — a few days here, a month there, eleven months prior, and so on — so quickly and so often that rooting the peripheral drama in the movie’s central, streamlined plot becomes an extremely tall order. The pieces themselves are quite powerful, involving bits and bobs of righteous fury and vigilante justice, but they’re rarely strung together with the requisite rhythm.
In the film’s ostensible present, as the lengthy raid unfolds, a noble, unnamed police constable (Anurag Thakur) objects to his superiors’ methods and their persecution of Devi at large. He’s a strange fictionalization meant to represent some nebulous conscience, an ethical dimension that is (or at least, ought to be) self-evident from the actions of the protagonists and antagonists alike. On one side stand the powerful, deputized by the law to harass poor villagers in pursuit of a Robin Hood figure. On the other stand Devi and her cohorts, a group of bandits forcing rich landowners to return stolen property and castrating men who are known to be rapists. These are primal thrills most viewers can get behind, and having to slow down to explain the morality behind them makes for languid viewing.
Still, Mehta and cinematographer Pip White craft an enticing atmosphere amid the gunfire, as day turns to night, and dust consumes the air. Rare are the times that a heroine in mainstream Indian cinema is cast with dark skin, and the filmmakers make her appropriately radiant — the way some of the villagers see her — planting the seeds for a kind of divinity that never fully comes to light. It’s a film of great visual and dramatic setups which all eventually scatter as the raid continues.
Devi lived an exceptional life until her 2001 assassination. So, the decision to tell her story through the lens of one event in the early ‘80s seeks to simultaneously demythologize her while lending credence to her mythologization in the first place. However, the film doesn’t spend enough time analyzing this pedestal, or its necessity, in moments of desperation.
“Phoolan” is a film of fluid contexts reduced to rigid highlights, and although these isolated moments sing, they seldom cohere in symphonic ways. Its story belongs entirely to the setting in which it unfolds, without ever fanning outward to detail the great importance of a woman vigilante of a lower caste, in a world of severe structural violence. One might be able to intuit these things from the movie’s frequent exposition, but rare are the moments in which Devi’s iconography is rousing, or truly, viscerally felt.
Grade: B-
“Phoolan” premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. Amazon MGM Studios will release it in the United States.
