Bulbbul

“A dark, blood-soaked, free-floating feminist fable… Despite the classic set-up, this ghost story does not go wholly by the genre playbook… One presumes that it is only the theme that has necessitated the period setting and the film isn’t suggesting that patriarchy is a thing of the past. “

Rating: 3 stars | Full review

“Bulbbul, a tale that sits daintily in the real world but dangles its feet in the universe of fairies and fables, is about how the world order is pivoted on male desire, and how this world reacts, with rage and revenge, when it encounters female desire.”

Rating: 3.5 stars | Full review

“Bathed in shades of reds and crimsons, Bulbbul is a feast for the eye, and Amit Trivedi’s unobtrusive haunting score powers the vivid images. But the film is as much about the darkness that resides in the hearts of men. It is about the unending cruelty, the entitlement, the subjugation that women have had to put up with forever.”

Rating: 3.5 stars | Full review

“Women’s feet play a crucial role in Anvita Dutt’s beguiling Bulbbul. From the opening shot of a young girl’s legs playfully dangling from a branch to the wider examination of the folklore surrounding the chudail.”

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“A beautiful woman is dangerous. If she smiles to herself, or is self-contained, or has the temerity to express her inner thoughts which are connected solely to her being, or isn’t automatically and permanently subservient to the men she is surrounded by, she is doubly dangerous.”

Rating: 3.5 stars | Full review

“Keenly aesthetic, slightly overboard; no, what is this? A Sanjay Leela Bhansali film in the supernatural space? Or Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964), supplanted from the same time-frame, in a separate context? Is the lead male actor (Avinash Tiwary) styled like he’s straight out of Vikramaditya Motwane’s Lootera (2013)?”

Rating: 2 stars | Full review

“While, no doubt, a lot of thought has gone into the look and feel of the film, eye-catching though it all is, it is very much in your face with the metaphors far too obvious.  The extensive use of red hues in the film’s color scheme only underlines in triplicate its emotions of passion, its moods of danger and its representation of gory violence and of course, blood – there is a lot of it. Each time the night is bathed in an aura of red, we know something untoward will happen. It does.”

Rating: stars | Full review

“Bulbbul is best thought of in conjunction with two other films by its producer Anushka Sharma. In Pari, Sharma is a victim of a satanic cult with otherworldly powers; in Phillauri, she’s a ghost in limbo. Taken together, these three films are a loose trilogy of supernatural feminine power, each concerned, in its own way, with the injustices women have faced, and continue to face.”

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