The race for the 99th Academy Awards has its Indian contender, and it is not the mainstream favourite many pundits had pencilled in. Gondhal, director Santosh Davakhar's Marathi-language thriller, has been selected as India's official entry in the Best International Feature Film category for the 2027 ceremony. The announcement lands as something of a jolt for awards watchers, given that the film arrived in theatres on 14 November 2025 with little of the fanfare that usually accompanies a national submission.
Produced within the Bollywood ecosystem but shot in Marathi, Gondhal runs 120 minutes and belongs firmly to the thriller genre - a classification that undersells how strange and volatile the film reportedly is.
At its centre is Suman, a woman trapped inside the Gondhal rituals of Maharashtra. Her plan is as dark as it is desperate: she conspires with Gondhali Saheba to murder Anand's cousin. What follows is an escape attempt that puts her soul in peril, staged against a backdrop of drum-driven ceremony and divine omens. The line between salvation and damnation collapses entirely, and the film builds toward what its own synopsis describes as a citywide verdict of fire, blood, and awe.
Ishita Deshmukh leads the cast as Suman, with Kishore Kadam playing Bhivaba. Yogesh Sohoni appears as Anand, known as Aandya, while Nishad Bhoir and Anuj Prabhu take the roles of Sarjerao and Sahebrao respectively. Suresh Vishwakarma plays Patil, Sarjerao's father. Madhavi Juvekar and Aishwarya Shinde round out the principal ensemble as Anand's mother and sister. The film's cultural specificity - its reliance on ritual rhythm, regional belief systems, and the moral murk of folk tradition - is precisely what makes it an unusual Oscar bet.
A Polarising Record Heading Into the Race
The selection committee's confidence in Gondhal sits awkwardly beside the film's reception data. Its TMDb rating stands at just 3 out of 10, a figure that signals a deeply divisive response rather than the broad critical embrace typically sought by countries campaigning for the international feature prize. Whether that score reflects genuine audience rejection or the kind of polarisation that often greets formally adventurous genre work is a question the campaign will have to confront directly.
For Davakhar, the submission represents a striking vote of faith in a filmmaker working well outside the commercial mainstream. A Marathi thriller rooted in Gondhal ritual - a performance tradition tied to worship, drumming, and possession - is not the kind of title that traditionally carries India's hopes into awards season. India has long leaned toward films with sweeping social themes or prestige historical canvases when making this call. Gondhal offers none of that comfort.
What the Academy Campaign Now Faces
The 99th Academy Awards will be held in 2027, meaning Gondhal enters a crowded international field that will only narrow once the Academy's shortlists are revealed. India has never won the Best International Feature Film Oscar, despite a long and often contentious history of submissions, and the country's choices have regularly sparked debate among critics who argue that safer, more accessible titles might fare better with voters.
That debate will now attach itself to Davakhar's film. Gondhal is uncompromising by design - a story about a woman who bargains with ritual power to escape her confinement, and who may lose her soul in the process. It is a thriller that trades in omens rather than explanations, and its imagery of fire and blood suggests a work far removed from the restrained humanism that has historically drawn Academy attention.
The film's theatrical release in November 2025 gives it a head start on visibility, but awards campaigning is a separate discipline entirely, requiring sustained screenings, press engagement, and the kind of narrative that convinces voters to watch a Marathi-language thriller with an unforgiving premise.
For now, the essential fact stands: India's official entry for the 99th Academy Awards is Gondhal, directed by Santosh Davakhar, starring Ishita Deshmukh and Kishore Kadam, and running 120 minutes. It is a Marathi film, produced within the Bollywood industry, and it arrives in the Oscar race carrying both genuine formal ambition and a 3/10 audience rating that will follow it into every conversation from here. Whether the Academy's international voters see revelation where general audiences saw confusion is the question that will define India's campaign through 2027.
Source: Filmibeat
