What happens when the guardians of ecological preservation become entangled with political power in the name of progress? That question sits at the center of 'The Vvaan: Force of the Forest', a Hindi eco-thriller that tries to fuse folklore, divine intervention and contemporary anxieties about development into a mass-market spectacle. On paper, the film's premise is sharply relevant: a forest, a disputed road project, a family divided over inherited land and a deity whose wrath is said to be provoked when sacred boundaries are violated. In practice, the film struggles to reconcile its ideas with a storytelling style that repeatedly slips into melodrama, predictability and tonal clutter.
The story follows Rishi, played by Sidharth Malhotra, a rational professional who returns to his ancestral village with his wife Mamta, portrayed by Tamannaah Bhatia, to sell inherited land. What begins as a family and property dispute quickly broadens into a larger conflict over whether a road should cut through the forest to reduce travel time to city infrastructure. On one side are those aligned with the development agenda, led by the duplicitous Deepak, played by Sunil Grover, who promise a better rate for the land. On the other are traditionalists, including Rishi's brother Shashi, played by Anup Soni, and his bitter sister-in-law, played by Shweta Tiwari, who fear that disturbing the forest will invite the wrath of the deity believed to protect it.
The film's central tension is rooted in a familiar but potent idea: that progress can become a cover for exploitation when those entrusted with stewardship turn corrupt. The source material frames the story as a dialectic between ecological conservation and modernisation, and the film does occasionally gesture toward a broader moral argument about the consequences of reneging on a pact with nature. But the screenplay, as described in the review, does not trust that premise to breathe on its own. Instead, it wraps the conflict in a glossy, high-pitched supernatural framework that seeks to deliver divine spectacle to an audience increasingly accustomed to grand mytho-mystical storytelling.
That ambition, however, appears to come at a cost. Directed by Deepak Kumar Mishra of 'Panchayat' fame, the film is said to lean heavily into the Balaji aesthetic, with heightened emotion and overtly stylised soap-opera tropes that sit uneasily beside TVF's more grounded reputation. The review suggests that the film's world-building is compromised by this creative compromise, with the narrative logic failing to hold together even as it tries to build an atmosphere of dread and reverence. Unlike survival thrillers such as 'Kaala Paani', which render nature's anger as an unsettling, formless force, 'The Vvaan: Force of the Forest' gives that threat a literal silhouette, making the supernatural more visible but not necessarily more effective.
The cast is caught in this tonal tug-of-war. Malhotra is positioned as the archetypal chosen one, though the screenplay does not ask him to do much beyond embodying that role. Grover, typically one of the most versatile performers in the ensemble, is described as playing the mercurial Deepak too straight, with the review suggesting that the character could have used more tonal colour. Tamannaah Bhatia's heightened emotional style is said to fit the Balaji blueprint, while Anup Soni is praised as reliably believable and Shweta Tiwari is noted as slipping back comfortably into the rhythms of household politics. The film's performances, in other words, seem to align with its competing identities rather than resolve them.
Where the film appears to falter most sharply is in structure. The review points to a repetitive narrative rhythm in which eerie encounters are followed by Chhath Puja rituals, only to be undercut by a recycled ghost gag involving Maniesh Paul and Sulbha Arya. That pattern, the review argues, feels less like organic storytelling than a desperate attempt to tap trends and court a broad audience. The result is a loop of scare, laugh and reset that prevents the tension from accumulating toward a meaningful climax. Even when the film hints that development and devotion are not simple binaries, it reportedly refuses to enter the moral ambiguity that would make those questions resonate.
The broader frustration is that 'The Vvaan: Force of the Forest' seems to understand the urgency of its subject but not always the discipline required to dramatise it. Its concerns are contemporary and its setting potentially rich with symbolic force, yet the execution is said to flatten that promise into a lopsided blend of sermon, spectacle and sitcom residue. By the time the film reaches its abrupt turns, the review suggests, the audience has already been trapped inside a predictable cycle that drains the story of momentum.
For a film about the consequences of violating nature's covenant, that may be the most telling irony of all: a story about imbalance undone by its own lack of balance.