The Girlfriend Movie Review: A Gripping Thriller

Bhooma (Rashmika Mandanna) is a literature student at a Hyderabad college, sharp, observant, and quietly yearning for something beyond the pages of her novels. Enter Vikram (Dheekshith Shetty), a magnetic campus figure whose initial charm feels scripted straight from a romance novel - grand gestures, poetic attention, intense eye contact. Bhooma falls, hard. But the fairy tale warps quickly. Vikram’s “passion” reveals a possessive core: he monitors her phone, interrogates her friendships, and frames his jealousy as devotion. When Bhooma’s friend Durga (Anu Emmanuel) warns her, the cracks deepen. The film follows Bhooma as she navigates gaslighting, isolation, and her own denial, culminating in a confrontation that forces her to choose between the man she loves and the person she’s becoming. Subplots involving Bhooma’s protective father (Rao Ramesh) and Vikram’s complicit mother (Rohini) add familial pressure, while Sudhir (Rahul Ravindran), a college lecturer, provides a quieter perspective on toxic patterns.

Rahul Ravindran clearly wanted to make a film that diagnoses, not glorifies, the kind of male dominance often romanticized in mainstream Telugu cinema. He largely succeeds. The first act plays like a conventional romance - sweet glances, library rendezvous, a rain-soaked proposal - but the tonal shift is deliberately jarring. Vikram’s transformation isn’t a villainous reveal; it’s a slow, insidious creep that many viewers will recognize from real life. Dheekshith Shetty deserves enormous credit here. He plays Vikram with a disarming smile that never fully disappears, even when he’s shouting. That refusal to turn him into a monster makes the film more unsettling.

Rashmika Mandanna, as Bhooma, gives her finest performance to date. She captures the contradiction of someone intelligent yet emotionally entangled: she sees the red flags intellectually but rationalizes them viscerally. Her breakdown in a phone call with her father - where she defends Vikram while tears betray her - is the film’s emotional anchor. Anu Emmanuel’s Durga serves as the audience surrogate, frustrated and clear-eyed, though her role diminishes in the second half. Rao Ramesh brings weary authority, and Rohini adds a chilling shade of maternal enablement.

Where The Girlfriend wobbles is in its structural choices. The 138-minute runtime feels padded, particularly in a middle stretch where Bhooma vacillates between awareness and denial for several repetitive scenes. The dialogue can be too on-the-nose - characters literally spell out Vikram’s manipulation tactics in academic terms, as if worried the audience missed the point. A subtler touch would have heightened the dread. The cinematography (by an uncredited team in the provided metadata, though the visuals are competent) uses tight framing to suggest Bhooma’s shrinking world, but the color palette leans grey and muted, occasionally draining emotional warmth.

The music and background score serve the mood without soaring. There’s no hit number to hum leaving the theater, which is intentional - the film doesn’t want you to feel good. Still, a few more moments of quiet reflection instead of score-heavy confrontation might have deepened the impact.

On TMDb, the rating sits at 6.528/10, which feels fair. It’s a film that respects its audience’s intelligence but occasionally underestimates their patience. The ending is ambiguous and polarizing - some will call it a cop-out, others a realistic portrait of how hard it is to leave.

Pros

• Rashmika Mandanna delivers a career-best, layered performance
• Dheekshith Shetty avoids caricature, creating a disturbingly believable toxic partner
• Unflinching portrayal of emotional abuse, eschewing melodrama for realism
• Strong supporting turns from Rao Ramesh and Rohini
• Rahul Ravindran’s direction shows clear thematic intent and empathy

Cons

• Pacing drags in the second act with repetitive internal conflict
• Overly explanatory dialogue undercuts the subtext
• Runtime feels fifteen minutes too long
• Some side characters (Durga, Sudhir) are underwritten in the latter half

The Girlfriend is not an easy watch, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s a mature, uncomfortable film that asks its audience to sit with the messiness of love and control. For those tired of sanitised romances, it’s a necessary corrective. For those seeking escapism, it may feel like a lecture. Rashmika Mandanna elevates the material to something worth discussing, and Rahul Ravindran proves he can tackle dark themes with sincerity. If you’re ready for a romance that leaves a bruise, this one deserves your attention.