Pooja Meri Jaan Review: A Sharp, Uncomfortable Thriller

Pooja Dogra (Mrunal Thakur) turns down the romantic advances of Aniket Srivastav (Vikram Singh Chauhan). When Aniket subsequently dies by suicide, the narrative around his death curdles into accusation: Pooja, the woman who refused him, becomes the villain of a story she never chose to be in. Enter Sana (Huma Qureshi), a lawyer and Pooja's friend, who begins pulling at the threads of the incident. What she finds isn't a clean case of harassment or a simple tragedy, but a tangled history - one that forces questions about what Pooja and Aniket actually meant to each other, and whether "no" was ever heard at all. Gulati's screenplay moves between investigation and memory, letting the truth surface in fragments rather than confessions. Supporting turns from Vijay Raaz as Jatin, Sunita Rajwar, Rajesh Jais, and Suparna Marwah as Aniket's mother fill out a world where everyone has already decided what happened.

The film's smartest decision is structural. Rather than opening on the death and working backward, Pooja Meri Jaan lets the aftermath lead, so the audience experiences the same drip-feed of information that Pooja does - except she's living inside it while we get to leave. Thakur plays her with a coiled stillness that's genuinely difficult to pull off: she isn't a martyr, and she isn't a saint, and the script resists making her either. There's a scene late in the second act where she's asked, essentially, to perform grief she doesn't feel for a man she didn't love, and Thakur lets the exhaustion sit on her face without a single line of dialogue. It's the best work she's done in a Hindi film to date.

Qureshi's Sana is the film's engine, and she's well-cast - brisk, sceptical, and not above her own blind spots. The friendship between the two women is written with a refreshing lack of sentimentality; they argue, they misread each other, and they keep showing up anyway. Gulati, working as both director and writer, keeps the camera close and the pacing tight, and he's clearly more interested in the psychology of accusation than in jump scares. The film is a thriller by genre, but its tension is largely conversational - depositions, arguments, the slow realisation that a dead man's version of events has more cultural weight than a living woman's.

Where it wobbles is the third act. Without spoiling anything, the resolution tilts toward tidiness in a story that had earned its ambiguity, and one late reveal feels engineered for a gasp rather than for meaning. The film is also, at 117 minutes, slightly overlong; a subplot involving Aniket's mother (Marwah, doing strong work with thin material) could have been trimmed without losing much. And for a movie so alert to the politics of consent, a couple of scenes lean on shorthand that undercuts its own intelligence.

Still, these are the missteps of an ambitious film rather than a careless one. Pooja Meri Jaan takes a premise that could have been tabloid fodder and treats it with genuine moral seriousness, and in doing so, it asks its audience to reconsider the reflexive sympathy we extend to the dead - and the reflexive suspicion we reserve for the women who outlive them.

Pros

• Mrunal Thakur delivers a career-best performance, restrained and devastating.
• Huma Qureshi's Sana is a genuinely well-drawn investigator, not a plot device.
• The screenplay treats consent and culpability with unusual nuance for the genre.
• Tight, conversational tension that avoids cheap thriller theatrics.
• Strong supporting cast, particularly Suparna Marwah and Vijay Raaz.

Cons

• The final act resolves too neatly for a film built on ambiguity.
• Slightly overlong at 117 minutes; one subplot drags.
• A late reveal prioritises shock over emotional logic.
• A few scenes slip into shorthand that works against the film's own themes.

Pooja Meri Jaan is the rare Hindi thriller that trusts silence, subtext, and two excellent lead performances over exposition. It doesn't stick the landing, but the conversation it starts - about obsession, responsibility, and who gets believed - is worth having. Catch it in theatres; this one plays better with an audience squirming alongside you.