Shikari
- Director
- Aadesh Shrivastva
- Studio
- Kavita Pictures
- Release Date
- 6 October 2000
- Language
- Hindi
- Budget
- ₹7.50 Cr
- Box Office
- ₹9.08 Cr
Review
Shikari stumbles through what could've been a taut revenge thriller but instead delivers a tangled mess of half-baked motivations and sloppy storytelling. The premise—a vengeful lover infiltrating a family under false pretenses—has genuine potential, but director fails to build any real tension or coherence. The film lurches from one plot point to another without earning its dramatic beats: Rajeshwari's character arc is nonsensical (why does she misread Om's obsession so badly?), Suman's arc is incomplete and frankly pathetic, and Om himself lacks any compelling reason for his vendetta beyond vague "dark history." The performances feel trapped in this muddled script—nobody here is bad enough to blame entirely, but nobody's good enough to salvage the material either. There's a domestic thriller buried somewhere in here, but it's been strangled by lazy writing and direction that can't decide whether it wants to be a family drama, a murder mystery, or a twisted love story.
What infuriates me most is how the film wastes its violence. The slap, the well sequence—these should punch you in the gut, should make you recoil. Instead they play as desperate shock tactics from a director grasping for relevance. The climax feels tacked on and unearned, and that "mysterious rescuer" Zafrani appears from nowhere like the script needed a convenient reset button. Shikari is competent enough to avoid being unwatchable, but it's deeply mediocre—the kind of film that confirms why this director's
Storyline
Vijayendra's sitting pretty as a Cape Town tycoon with everything except a real marriage—his wife Suman's basically a stranger to him, and things get messier when a charming spice businessman named Mahendra Pratap Singhania rolls into town. Vijayendra thinks he's found the perfect business opportunity, but Mahendra's actually Om Srivastav in disguise, carrying a dark vendetta that goes way back. Om lures Vijayendra to a forest celebration and murders him in cold blood, then slides into his funeral acting like an old friend from India, setting up the perfect cover.
Rajeshwari smells trouble immediately—something about Om's timing is off—and she starts digging while Suman's secretly falling apart because Om was her first love before her father forced her to marry Vijayendra. A tense cat-and-mouse game unfolds between Rajeshwari and Om, with her nearly exposing him, until she finds pictures of herself at his place and completely misreads the situation, thinking he's obsessed with *her*. When Rajeshwari finally discovers the truth and threatens to expose him, Om doesn't hesitate—he slaps her hard and tosses her into a dry well, leaving her for dead.
Suman and Om go searching for Rajeshwari together, but a stranger named Zafrani rescues her from the well and she races back to confront them both. Rajeshwari's convinced Suman was in on it the whole time, but when Om ties them up and confesses everything with Suman right there, the truth explodes—Suman's completely innocent, just a tragic pawn in Om's revenge. It's a gut-punching twist that rewrites everything you thought you knew about these characters!
