New Delhi: Director Rahul Ravindran’s The Girlfriend is steadily emerging as the first big Telugu breakout of the year, with audiences calling it the “best Telugu film of the year”. Starring actor Rashmika Mandanna, the film has become a conversation piece – one that interrogates the “nice guy” trope, foregrounds women choosing themselves, and centres female friendships in a space usually dominated by male desire.
Clips from the film have been circulating across Instagram and X, accompanied by captions like “women written by a man” and, more specifically, “women written by Rahul Ravindran” – a reference to the director’s earlier work in Chi La Sow (2018), which also featured layered female characters.
The ‘nice guy’
The film follows Bhooma Devi, a postgraduate student drawn into a relationship with Vikram (Dheekshith Shetty), the campus heartthrob whose charm obscures persistent gaslighting and emotional manipulation. Much of the narrative unfolds around the gap between how others see him—desirable, sensitive, a prize—and how Bhooma silently experiences the relationship.
The moment from the film that has arguably travelled the farthest online is a scene where Bhooma visits Vikram’s home and meets his mother. Her subservience, lack of agency, and almost eerie absence of individual will operate as a warning – it could be Bhooma’s possible future too.
Viewers reshared the clip with captions calling it a “horror scene”, a moment that crystallises how patriarchy is often naturalised through mothers who carry the burden of unpaid labour and how sons expect their partners to replicate that unconditional devotion.
Durga (Anu Emmanuel), initially positioned as Bhooma’s “rival” for Vikram’s attention, becomes the film and the protagonist’s moral pivot. Their friendship, which grows after the sheen of competition fades, has been praised by fans as a refreshing depiction of female camaraderie in recent Telugu cinema.
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What fans and critics say
Praising its writing, performances and emotional acuity, fans have called the movie a “must-watch” and lauded Mandanna’s performance as the “best of her career” so far.
The admiration isn’t limited to fans. Film critics such as Namrata Joshi have been posting about the film on social media.
“A Telugu film that will make many women, across NSEW (North-South-East-West), feel seen, not just when it comes to themselves but the many others around them,” Joshi wrote.
She congratulated the director for paying heed to “a woman’s primal cry”, and referenced movies like Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Arjun Reddy (2018) or Kabir Singh (2019) that glorify such patterns and get away in the guise of a “well-made film”.
“It’s a steady systematic peeling of a toxic relationship that scrutinises male entitlement and the horrors of the love trap that naive, vulnerable women often get caught in,” she wrote.
The Girlfriend was released on Friday.
(Edited by Stella Dey)