Hichki
- Director
- Siddharth P Malhotra
- Studio
- Yash Raj Films
- Release Date
- 22 March 2018
- Running Time
- 116 min
- Language
- Hindi
- Country
- India
- Budget
- ₹20.00 Cr
- Box Office
- ₹215.00 Cr
Cast
Review
Sridevi's return to cinema after nearly two decades could have been a calculated, safe affair, but Rani Mukerji's "Hichki" instead charges forward with genuine warmth and specificity. The film refuses the temptation to make Tourette's syndrome merely a plot device; instead, director Siddharth P. Malhotra uses Naina's involuntary utterances as a lens through which to examine society's reflexive dismissal of the "different." Mukerji delivers a performance of remarkable restraint—the hiccups are never played for laughs, and her scenes of quiet frustration at repeated rejections carry a cumulative weight. The film's central conceit—that a teacher with a disability becomes the unlikely savior of "problem" students—could have descended into saccharine territory, yet Malhotra navigates it with surprising intelligence, allowing both Naina and her slum-dwelling students genuine agency rather than reducing them to inspiration-porn figures.
What anchors "Hichki" is its refusal to provide easy answers. The film acknowledges that systemic barriers are real, that prejudice runs deep in institutions, and that good intentions alone cannot overcome entrenched class structures. The students are not magically transformed; rather, they're shown as capable young people whose circumstances and lack of institutional support had rendered them invisible. Mukerji's chemistry with her ensemble cast—particularly in scenes where she must navigate mockery and establish credibility—feels earned rather tha
Storyline
So there's this woman named Naina who's got her degrees and everything, ready to be a teacher, but nobody wants to hire her because she has Tourette's syndrome—basically she makes these involuntary sounds that come out like hiccups. Her mom and brother keep believing in her, but her dad thinks she's wasting her time and should just get a regular job in banking. After five years of getting rejected, she finally lands a teaching position at this fancy school, which sounds like a win until she finds out why they were so desperate to hire her.
Turns out the class they assign her to, 9F, is basically the school's problem child situation. All the other teachers gave up on these kids because they're rowdy, disruptive, and different from the rest. Naina discovers they're students from the local slum who only got into the school because of a quota system after their original school got shut down for being too expensive to maintain. When she walks in that first day, the students straight-up mock her condition, and then things get wild when they pull pranks like exploding liquid nitrogen in her classroom.
But here's where Naina shows her true character—instead of letting the administration kick out the whole class, she somehow manages to convince them that the students actually have potential. She argues that if kids can pull off that complicated prank, they've got the brainpower to do amazing things if someone actually channels it right. So she decides to approach teaching them in a completely different way, showing them that she's not going to give up on them, no matter how tough things get.
