The actor, so far known for television, steps up to a crime thriller alongside Mrunal Thakur and Huma Qureshi that turns a stalking case into courtroom drama.
Vikram Singh Chauhan has his first leading role in a feature film, and it's not a light one. He's part of Pooja Meri Jaan, a crime thriller from Maddock Films that follows a woman named Pooja who becomes the target of an obsessive admirer, and traces how that obsession curdles into something the courts eventually have to deal with.
The cast lines up as Mrunal Thakur, Huma Qureshi, Vijay Raaz and Chauhan, with Navjot Gulati directing and Vipasha Arvind co-directing. Dinesh Vijan and Amar Kaushik produce under the Maddock banner, the studio that's built a reputation on genre films that don't play it safe on tone. This one, going by the setup, sits somewhere between a stalker thriller and a courtroom procedural, using rejection and its fallout as the engine for both.
Chauhan's character is the one carrying most of that emotional shifting. He isn't introduced as one thing and left there. The film reportedly moves him through situations that keep recalibrating how the audience is meant to see him, and that arc is what pulled Chauhan into the project in the first place.
"Pooja Meri Jaan was an interesting film for me because of the kind of character I got to play," Chauhan said. "There are a lot of emotions involved, and the character goes through different situations that slowly change the way you look at him. I enjoyed working on those parts because they gave me a chance to do something different from what I have done before."
He went further on what the shoot actually demanded of him.
"What I found interesting about the film was the way it deals with rejection and the impact it can have on people," he said. "The story does not look at these emotions in just one way, and that made it more engaging for me. While working on the film, I tried to understand where my character was coming from and what was driving his actions. It was a challenging role in some ways, but I really enjoyed the process."
For an actor who's built his following on television, this is a real jump. Leading a film for a producer like Vijan, whose Maddock slate has ranged from Stree to Bhediya, puts Chauhan next to actors with far bigger theatrical footprints, and the film gives him a character messy enough to actually show what he can do with it.
The trailer for Pooja Meri Jaan is out now, with the film headed for release around October 2. Whether audiences buy Chauhan as the man at the centre of Pooja's ordeal, rather than just a supporting face, is the question the film now has to answer on its own.
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