Five days before The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest opens in theatres, its cast made a stop that had nothing to do with a trailer launch or a song reveal. Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia, along with the rest of the team, met Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary in what Bollywood Hungama reported was a courtesy call following the crew's own observance of Chhath Pooja for the film.

Choudhary reportedly used the meeting to praise the cast and crew for putting Bihar's rituals on the mainstream Hindi screen, something the state's cinema rarely gets credit for outside folk and regional productions. The team put out a statement calling themselves "overwhelmed and grateful for the love and warmth" they've received from Bihar, adding it was "a privilege" to meet the chief minister and that the film is "rooted in spirit of the soil."

It's the kind of moment a studio plans for, sure. But it also tracks with what the film is actually selling. The Vvaan isn't your standard urban rom-com or slick heist plot. It's a folklore-fantasy thriller built around a forbidden forest and the beliefs that keep villagers away from it after dark.

What the film is actually about

Malhotra plays a city-bred rationalist who returns to his ancestral village and shrugs off the old warnings about a sacred forest nobody's supposed to enter past sunset. He goes in anyway. What he wakes up is not explained away by science, and the village ends up paying for his skepticism. Deepak Kumar Mishra, who built his name on Panchayat, directs from a story by TVF founder Arunabh Kumar, which explains why the film leans so hard on rural texture rather than urban gloss.

Tamannaah Bhatia headlines opposite him, with Sunil Grover, Anup Soni, Shweta Tiwari and Maniesh Paul rounding out a supporting cast that's heavier on character actors than star wattage. Balaji Motion Pictures, run by Ektaa R. Kapoor and Shobha Kapoor, produces alongside TVF Motion Pictures and 11:11 Productions, which puts three fairly different production sensibilities behind one film. Balaji's instinct for genre thrills, TVF's grounded storytelling, and a folklore premise that hasn't really been tried at this scale in Hindi cinema.

The timing of the Chhath Pooja angle isn't incidental either. Chhath, a festival tied closely to Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, rarely gets screen time in Hindi films beyond a passing reference. If The Vvaan actually builds a sequence around it, as the promotional push suggests, that's a rare thing for a mainstream release carrying two Bollywood leads.

Whether the film delivers on the mythology it's promising is a different question, and one that gets answered on September 25 when it opens theatrically. Bollywood Hungama also noted the film has an OTT premiere lined up after its cinema run, though no platform or date has been named yet. For now, the story is the reception in Bihar itself, and whether that goodwill travels with the film once it leaves the state.