Daayra Box Office: Meghna Gulzar's Film Opens Cold

Meghna Gulzar's Kareena Kapoor and Prithviraj-led investigation drama drew mixed reviews and thin ticket sales, reviving questions about her post-Raazi run.

Daayra was supposed to be Meghna Gulzar returning to the genre that made her name. It hasn't quite worked out that way.

The film, starring Kareena Kapoor and Prithviraj and built around a real-life investigation, was pitched as a companion piece to Talvar, still widely regarded as her sharpest work. Instead, per Rediff, it has landed to a mixed bag of reviews and a cold response at the ticket windows.

That's a rough outcome for a director whose name usually guarantees at least a conversation, even when the film itself doesn't land. Social media chatter since Daayra's release has been blunt, with several posts calling it one of Kareena's weakest openings in years. CutMirchi has not independently verified specific box office figures for the film and is treating those claims as unconfirmed for now.

What isn't in dispute is the pattern. Gulzar's career has never moved in a straight line. She debuted with Filhaal in 2002, a surrogacy drama with Tabu and Sushmita Sen that Rediff calls a decent watch undone by melodrama, and followed it with Just Married, a film so unremarkable that even a favourable critic admits he'd forgotten it existed. Then came an eight-year gap.

Talvar, in 2015, changed the conversation entirely. Rediff calls it arguably Bollywood's best-acted investigation drama, and it set up the version of Meghna Gulzar that audiences wanted more of. Raazi, two years later, delivered on that promise commercially, becoming her highest-grossing film and only the second female-led film to cross Rs 100 crore domestically.

Since then, the ground has been shakier. Chhapaak, built around acid attack survivor Laxmi Agarwal's story, got tangled in controversies that had nothing to do with the film itself, and drew criticism for slipping into a docu-drama mode in its back half. Sam Bahadur, the Vicky Kaushal-led Sam Manekshaw biopic, ran into the familiar trap of Indian biopics about decorated military and political figures, treating its subject with what Rediff describes as a hagiographic touch that flattens him into a Wikipedia entry with better lighting.

Daayra was meant to be the course correction, a return to the procedural rigour that made Talvar work. Whether it delivers that, per early reviews, seems to depend on who you ask. What's consistent across the responses so far is that nobody's calling it her best work since Raazi.

The bigger question now is what Daayra's reception does to her next project, and whether the industry starts treating her the way it treats directors who've had one classic and a string of near-misses since. For now, the film is still finding its audience in theatres, and how the numbers hold up over the coming weekend will say more than any review has.