Phoolan Review: The Siege Is Vivid, the Political Life Distant

Before the pursuit begins, Richie Mehta’s Phoolan declares its respect for government authorities and the police. The wording is striking in a film about Phoolan Devi, a lower-caste woman hunted by thousands of officers. A disclaimer that the events have been dramatized is understandable. The additional assurance asks for something harder: that the institution pursuing her be treated with deference before we have seen what it does.

Mehta and co-writer Anu Singh give us reason to question that assurance. Officers searching a village take residents’ valuables and keep families from their homes and food. One constable objects, only to have a superior challenge his caste and loyalty. The exchange gives the police a dissenting voice, but it also shows the terms on which dissent is permitted. The villagers’ predicament says as much without explanation. Their protection of Phoolan comes at a cost they cannot indefinitely bear.

For most of its 113 minutes, the film stays close to a 48-hour siege. Phoolan, played by Sneha Kumari, and two companions search for places to hide while a far larger force tries to flush them out. The scale makes an immediate impression, yet Mehta’s best choice is to let Phoolan think her way through it. She needs water, judges where to move next and turns the officers’ numbers against them by tricking them into firing on one another. Her companions defer to her decisions. She is a leader in these scenes because people trust her judgment under pressure.

Kumari makes that authority convincing without playing every encounter at the same pitch. In the pursuit, her movement has the urgency of someone measuring each moment for a possible exit. In flashbacks, she can meet a threat with open defiance or recount abuse with a detachment that holds her feelings out of others’ reach. When Phoolan is barred from a village well because she is considered “dirty,” Kumari’s refusal to accept the insult tells us something that the film’s accounts of her suffering cannot: she expects to occupy the same public space as anyone else.

The well also places her rebellion within a social order that reaches into daily necessities. Earlier events show her family losing land, her resistance drawing the anger of a local patriarch, and bandits being sent to abduct her. Later, she makes wealthy landowners return property deeds. Singh and Mehta have material here for a sharp account of caste, property and the force available to those who hold both status and land. The water denied at the well and the water sought during the siege belong to the same story, even as the film moves between them.

Those moves through time are uneven. The pauses in the manhunt allow glimpses of Phoolan’s childhood, forced marriage and rise within an armed gang without staging her entire life as a procession of ordeals. That restraint matters.

Yet frequent jumps, sometimes marked by intertitles, give her change from abductee to commander the feel of selected incidents rather than a development we can fully follow. The film is clearest when an earlier injury bears directly on a choice she makes during the raid. At other points, it returns us to the chase before an encounter has revealed much about how she gained the allegiance of those beside her.

Mehta and cinematographer Pip White give the siege an atmosphere of dust, gunfire and fading light. A helicopter attack and the police firing on one another offer reversals within what could have become a repetitive escape. Still, the village’s geography is not always clear enough for the action to convey just how narrowly Phoolan gets away. Time spent following the officers also loosens our attachment to her view of the pursuit. The film wants their force to feel overwhelming, but its account of their blunders sometimes makes them seem easier to evade than their numbers suggest.

That problem touches the film’s treatment of Phoolan’s reputation. Officers trade fantastic descriptions of her size and cruelty, while villagers see in her someone willing to confront people they cannot. The gap between those accounts is rich territory for an Indian film about a woman turned into a public figure during her own lifetime. Kumari supplies a person alert to danger beneath the stories told about her. The screenplay gives less attention to how those stories help her, burden her or change what her supporters ask of her.

Mehta’s film also arrives after Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, a portrayal Devi herself disputed. Phoolan has reason to be careful about claiming authority over her life. Its closing archive footage lets Devi speak about her advocacy for women and the poor, a valuable choice after so much dramatization. Yet the contrast with the opening disclaimer remains.

The film can show police mistreating villagers and Phoolan resisting the order that enabled it, while its framing language still strains to reassure every institution implicated in that story. Kumari makes the woman pursued through the village vivid. When the film turns to the political life she later led, it must leave that life to a recording and the end titles.

Phoolan world-premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 16, 2026, ahead of its streaming release on Amazon Prime Video. The biographical survival thriller captures a harrowing 48-hour siege in the Chambal region where a young Phoolan Devi is trapped by thousands of armed men.

Full Credits

• Title: Phoolan

• Distributor: Amazon Prime Video

• Release date: September 16, 2026 (Toronto International Film Festival)

• Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes (112 minutes)

• Director: Richie Mehta

• Writers: Richie Mehta, Anu Singh

• Producers and Executive Producers: Shareen Mantri Kedia, Kishor Arora, Kanwal Kohli, Richie Mehta

• Cast: Sneha Kumari, Anurag Thakur, Vikram Pratap Singh, Aakash Dahiya, Prateek Pachouri, Devdutt Banodiya

• Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Pip White

• Editors: Beverley Mills