Sonal Joshi will direct the fantasy horror project, which is expected to go on floors before the year is out, Bollywood Hungama reported.
Karan Johar's Dharma Productions has found its leads for Vishkanya. Rajkummar Rao and Pratibha Ranta will headline the fantasy horror project, according to an exclusive report from Bollywood Hungama, with Ranta playing the title role.
The film is being directed by Sonal Joshi, who made her feature debut with the Shilpa Shetty comedy-drama Sukhee back in 2023. Before that she spent years as an assistant director, working under Vijay Krishna Acharya on Dhoom 3 and under Imtiaz Ali on Tamasha and Jab Harry Met Sejal. She also has a Netflix credit, having worked on Emraan Hashmi's Bard of Blood. Shooting on Vishkanya is expected to begin before the end of this year, per the report.
Details of the plot are being kept close, but the pitch is bigger than a haunted-house scare. Sources cited by Bollywood Hungama describe Vishkanya as building an entire mythic world of its own, one that leans into dread and existential terror rather than the usual jump-scare playbook. Given the title, a nod to the old vishkanya legend of poison maidens trained as living weapons, the fantasy element looks baked into the premise rather than bolted on.
This is Rao's second film with Dharma, after he led Sharan Sharma's Mr. & Mrs. Mahi opposite Janhvi Kapoor in 2024. For Ranta, it is also her second Dharma outing. She broke through with Kiran Rao's Laapataa Ladies and followed it with Accused, a psychological thriller alongside Konkona Sen Sharma that landed on Netflix in February.
Vishkanya isn't an isolated bet. It slots into a genre push Dharma has been building out steadily, one that now runs well beyond the rom-coms the studio is best known for. The slate already includes Kartik Aaryan's fantasy comedy Naagzilla, a Malayalam period folk thriller called Odiyan: The Age of Illusion, and a separate horror film fronted by Aditya Roy Kapur. All three are pegged for theatrical release next year.
The studio's ambitions don't stop at genre swings either. Raj Mehta's Lag Ja Gale, with Tiger Shroff, Lakshya and Janhvi Kapoor, and an untitled psychological romance from Prosit Roy starring Lakshya and Vedika Pinto are both in the pipeline for 2027-28. There's also a Radha-Krishna epic in development, and Dharma used the same day to confirm a large-scale spy film built around R.N. Kao, the man who founded R&AW.
That's a lot of plates spinning for one production house, and Vishkanya will need to distinguish itself in a crowded horror-fantasy field that Bollywood has suddenly decided to chase all at once. No release date has been set. The next marker to watch is whether Rao and Ranta's shoot actually kicks off on schedule before December runs out.
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