I never took a liking to Monster Movies. To me, they’re cheap and pedestrian. Yet what I find fascinating about the vast majority of them, like Jaws, Frankenstein, Jurassic Park et al., is how they use their Monster not only to initiate and advance the plot but to coax the personal and collective struggles from the movie’s characters. The Monster brings everything out in the open, secrets are revealed and hidden emotions are asserted.
Sherni is no exception. The movie’s Monster, a tigress terrorizing Indian villagers due to their continuous encroachment of her territory, isn’t the actual villain. Her purpose in the film however is to rip the bandage off and expose the real villain – a country’s fucked up bureaucracy fueled by its morally odious demagogues.
Enter the Hero, Vidya Vincent (Vidya Balan), an Indian Forest Services senior officer with an unstained conscience, who is sent in to rectify the tigress situation only to find out that it is actually the bureaucratic male fuckwits she is forced to deal with on the daily who need to be put away. Unlike the vast majority of Bollywood Heroes, Vidya Vincent doesn’t grandstand. Instead, like most women (and tigresses), she employs tact, patience and a razor-sharp acumen to achieve her goals.
On the outset, this is what the film is about. But I suspect that it might all just be a ruse, a diversion to the actual story filmmaker Amit Masurkar wants us to pay attention to; the story of today’s India which prioritizes commodity markets and their obsession with cash crops over environmental conservation and destitute farmers.
Why else would Masurkar give as much screen time to faceless, nameless villagers and Forest Service workers as the supposed main characters of the film? Why else does Sherni have the cool, calm and collected tone of an educational television special on news channels like France 24 and BBC, and not the tone of the terse thriller it projects itself as?
I’m honestly not entirely sure what Masurkar’s motives are, I’m just guessing here. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong. Either way, Sherni is great cinema.
