Critics Review: ‘Gul Makai’ Doesn’t Attempt to Flesh out Malala

The film is a biopic on Malala Yousafzai.

Gul Makai: The film depicts the journey of Nobel laureate and female education activist Malala Yousafzai.

Director: Amjad Khan

Cast: Reem Shaikh, Divya Dutta, Atul Kulkarni, Om Puri, Kamlesh Gill

Here’s what the critics have to say:

“Gul Makai is more of an origin story about how Malala used the alias Gul Makai for her BBC blog about living under the threat of the Taliban and the importance of education for all. Gul Makai is well-intentioned but as a film, it flails about, overusing background music, abruptly ending scenes, not convincingly recreating an environment and shortchanging its subject. The script feels like a compilation of information culled from news clippings, Wikipedia, and books on Malala. Best to go straight to the source material and bypass this ennui.”

Udita Jhunjhunwala, Firstpost

“Amjad Khan’s Gul Makai doesn’t even attempt to flesh out its young heroine. We are promised a biopic and instead we get a hack job about an overwrought teenager, her saintly father, evil terrorists with carrot-coloured beards who stack assault weapons alongside their copies of the Quran, and Anant Joag as former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf. Various other Mumbai actors attempt to pass themselves off as Pakistanis in this Bollywood version of events. Malala is portrayed by television actor Reem Shaikh, but instead of the brave and outspoken teenager who went on to become a poster child in the fight against religious fundamentalism, we get a bundle of nerves who weeps frequently and wakes up screaming from nightmares.”

Nandini Ramnath, Scroll