Some of the people who reviewed it said that they think the movie is a 7, but were giving it a 10 to fight the zeros. About 27% of the votes were zeros and about 35% were 10s. The views have been polarised to such a point - I was sent a screenshot of the IMDB ratings and 60% of the reviews were divided between 0 and 10. That was something I was really hoping for. Then there are people who are taking that little extra moment to think about what the film made them feel. People are trying to find somebody who agrees with them. You then latch on to a reviewer, somebody who tells you what to feel. Now if you feel a little more unsettled, and you don’t sit with yourself and try to process why you’re feeling what you’re feeling, then I think you could have a reaction that is not positive. My hope was that if two people watch the film together, they could both take home a different feeling.
The film also ends at a place where it doesn’t tell you what to feel… It tries to have a one-on-one relationship with the audience. In the mainstream, people expect things to be a certain way and when you experiment and step into the unfamiliar, it unsettles people. I think the film is a bit of an unfamiliar animal. Shakun Batra: The movie is not without its flaws but that said, I’ll tell you a few things that we’ve tried to understand. Have you got a sense of what it is about the film that makes it so divisive? I wanted people to have an interpretation of this film and now that it is happening, I can’t go and correct these interpretations. I’m happy to take the bad, I’m happy to take the good. It took me time to understand that there are such extreme views on the film, but I have to say that I’m now more ready to embrace it in totality. But the extremes to which it has gone… I got an email which straight up said ‘ Bh*****d, agar picture banani nahi aati toh kyu bana rahe ho?’ (If you don’t know how to direct, why make a film?) On the same day I got an email from a psychologist in Australia who appreciated how the psychology of these characters had been dealt with. I knew that there could be a polarised opinion. Shakun Batra: At some level, I did want a film like this to spark a conversation. I’ve read pieces that have called it a landmark film, others that have said it’s an extremely shallow film about rich South Bombay people. I’m amazed at the volume of writing and social media discourse around Gehraiyaan.
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