Sloppy writing, unimaginative direction sink Srijit Mukherji’s Sherdil

In 2019, hospital officials, forest officials and district administration near the Ranthambore Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan had a unique problem on their hands. They discovered that a surprising number of villagers living in the area were in the habit of faking tiger attacks and calling hotline numbers to inform about tigers roaming their village—another false claim, as the officials confirmed later. The root cause of this local rash of hoaxes was simple: the cash-strapped villagers were trying to claim the compensation amount of Rs 4 lakh that the government had announced would be given to any survivors of a tiger attack (or in the case of their demise, to their families).

Srijit Mukherji ’s Hindi-language film Sherdil takes this basic premise and tries its darndest to extract every last bit of dramatic mileage from it. Early in the piece, there’s a scene where we see the film’s protagonist Gangaram (Pankaj Tripathi), the sarpanch of Jhundao village in Uttar Pradesh, pleading his village’s case in front of local government officials—he wants his village to be the recipient of a particular welfare scheme. The official responds with the following line: “Scheme koi bhandaare ka prasaad ai jo haath mein liya, aapko diyaa aur keh diya ‘Jai Mata Di!’” (The scheme isn’t some prasaad that I’ll give it to you just like that and say, ‘Jai Mata Di’!) This in-your-face cruelty and the fact of the promised government compensation (Rs 10 lakh here) provokes Gangaram into taking a drastic decision—he will find a tiger, get himself killed and then the village (starved of rain, of irrigation facilities, of food-grain) can use that money to save itself.

The problem is, Sherdil is practically overrun with too-clever-by-half lines like the one we just quoted. And director Srijit Mukherji overcooks just about every potentially interesting moment—the aforementioned scene, for instance, ends with the government official high-fiving his colleague in front of the beleaguered Gangaram. Can you imagine middle-aged sarkari employees high-fiving each other as they politely tell you to fuck off? I mean, I know things are bad but they aren’t as nakedly surreal as this (yet).

The film’s consistently terrible writing means that what could have been an interesting experiment in exploring binaries like man/animal, development/deforestation, poacher/conservator. Mukherji, however, would rather give us a dreadlocked poacher named Jim (Neeraj Kabi) and have him spout nonstop word-salads about sin and redemption, stuff that sounded outdated in the late 90s. Not that the screenplay is much better for the other characters—Sayani Gupta, who plays Gangaram’s wife, also gets some very trite lines. Gangaram’s mother cries so much and so frequently that it threatens to cross over into parody territory.

I don’t understand why Mukherji made the screenplay decision to continually pause the story in the second half, in order to deliver clichéd, weepy flashback scenes that show us how Gangaram got his family as well as the rest of the village to go along with his suicide mission—at one point he even tells them that he is terminally ill and only has a few months to live. But this subplot about the fake illness barely gets a mention from that point on. Either the good people of Jhundao are A-okay with cancer in the family, or they’re displaying a kind of dissociative cheeriness but Mukherji’s writing makes absolutely no sense here. All of this is a crying shame because Tripathi and Kabi are both seasoned performers who give it their best shot—but are ultimately powerless to stop the film from devolving into a sea of stereotypes.

Mukherji’s career as a director has been very frustrating indeed, as followers of Bengali cinema will know. It’s not like the man is without talent or does not know how to shoot things—in his anthology film Nirbaak, for instance, there are some visual compositions that are stunning. Even the stories themselves are relatively well-thought-out, even when they’re talking about the inherently ridiculous—like the segment where a tree falls in love with Sushmita Sen’s character. But in the final equation, the director has given us far more misses than hits—Rajkahini was bombastic and over-the-top, Zulfiqar (the director’s version of Macbeth) was a flaming hot mess of bad performances and worse hairdos, films like Uma and Gumnaami flattered to deceive, second halves nose-diving in quality.

Someday, Srijit will fulfil the promise of some of his early works, but today is not that day, alas, and Sherdil is certainly not that film.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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