"Gandhari" has turned into a phenomenon that few saw coming, and Netflix's global rankings are now reflecting what Indian audiences have suspected since the film dropped on September 3: Devashish Makhija's taut kidnapping thriller has legs far beyond its opening weekend. The Hindi-language action-drama, headlined by Taapsee Pannu and Ishwak Singh, has climbed to the top of Netflix's global film chart, holding the number one spot across multiple territories and trending at number one in India. For Ishwak Singh, the milestone extends one of the more remarkable streaks by any Indian actor working today - a run that now spans streaming successes across wildly different genres.
The film's premise is deceptively simple and brutally efficient. Pannu plays Bani, a mother who loses both her eyesight and her daughter in a kidnapping, then decides that the system's failure is not something she can afford to accept. What follows is a revenge narrative stripped of glamour, built instead on desperation and physical limitation. Makhija, who previously directed "Bhonsle" and "Joram," brings his signature interest in marginalised lives and institutional indifference to a story that could easily have been a conventional vigilante vehicle. That he instead makes Bani's blindness a constant tactical problem - rather than a superpower - has been central to the film's critical conversation.
The 117-minute runtime is lean, and the ensemble around Pannu is unusually deep for the genre. Mita Vashisht, Swastika Mukherjee, Chhaya Kadam, Jatin Sarna, Prashant Narayanan and Chandan Roy all appear in supporting roles. Ishwak Singh plays Gokul, a character whose exact function in Bani's hunt has been a subject of audience debate since release - the kind of ambiguity that streaming audiences tend to reward with repeat viewings and social media theorising.
Ishwak Singh's remarkable run
Singh's ascent has been one of the quieter success stories in Hindi cinema over the past few years, built less on star vehicles than on consistently smart choices. He broke out with "Paatal Lok," where his portrayal of a cynical young cop became the show's moral centre, and followed it with "Rocket Boys," in which he played Vikram Sarabhai opposite Jim Sarbh's Homi Bhabha. That series turned him into a household name among streaming subscribers without ever making him a conventional leading man. He has since accumulated a filmography that reads like a checklist of prestige projects across platforms and languages, and "Gandhari" adds another global chart-topper to a resume that already carries more streaming hits than most actors manage in a decade.
What makes the streak notable is its range. Singh has moved between period drama, investigative thriller and now a mother-daughter revenge story in which he is not the central figure. That willingness to cede the spotlight has apparently not hurt his momentum. In "Gandhari," his presence provides ballast to Pannu's increasingly unhinged protagonist, and the contrast between the two performances has become one of the film's most discussed elements.
A global chart with a distinctly Indian shape
The film's worldwide performance also says something about how Netflix's Indian slate now travels. A Hindi thriller with no franchise pedigree and no theatrical window can top a global chart within weeks of release, a path that would have seemed improbable five years ago. Titles like "Gandhari" benefit from the platform's recommendation machinery and from an audience that has grown comfortable with subtitled Indian genre cinema. The film's genre blend - action, drama and thriller in roughly equal measure - makes it an easy algorithmic sell, but its word-of-mouth has clearly done heavier lifting.
The ratings question
Not everything about the film's reception is uncomplicated. Its TMDb rating sits at 5.4 out of 10, a middling figure that sits awkwardly alongside its chart dominance. That gap is familiar to anyone who tracks streaming hits: user ratings on aggregator sites skew toward a particular kind of viewer, and mass-audience titles often underperform there even as they rack up enormous watch hours. The divergence is less a contradiction than a reminder that "most watched" and "best reviewed" are different measurements entirely.
What's next
For Makhija, "Gandhari" represents his most commercially visible project to date, arriving after years of festival acclaim. For Pannu, it is another entry in a filmography increasingly defined by roles that place women at the centre of genre stories. And for Singh, the chart-topping debut adds further weight to the argument that he has become one of the most reliable presences in Indian streaming - a actor whose name on a project now signals a certain level of ambition. Whether "Gandhari" holds its number one position through the coming weeks will depend on Netflix's release calendar, but its opening surge has already secured it a place in the platform's 2026 highlight reel.
Source: Filmibeat
