The Vvaan Review Roundup: Critics Split Hard as Sidharth Malhotra's Mythological Thriller Opens to ₹31.75 Crore
The Vvaan – Force of the Forest has now actually opened, and the reviews landed exactly the way a film built on a shaky mix of sincere folklore and mass-market genre furniture tends to land: nobody agrees on whether it works. Two of the more detailed reviews out this weekend gave the film a 3.5 out of 5 and a 2.5 out of 5 respectively, for reasons that don't just disagree on a star rating but disagree on what the film is actually good or bad at. Meanwhile, the box office numbers — courtesy of Bollywood Hungama's tracking — tell a more straightforward story: a solid, if unspectacular, opening weekend that grew day over day rather than front-loading and fading.
This site has already covered The Vvaan twice — once with a full pre-release breakdown of the cast, the real folklore behind the story, and the film's release-date shuffle, and once on the Aigiri Nandini plagiarism controversy that broke days before release. This post is about what happened once the film actually reached theatres: what critics said, and what audiences actually paid to see.
The premise, briefly
For anyone catching up: The Vvaan follows Rishi (Sidharth Malhotra), a skeptical Mumbai architect who returns to his ancestral village with his wife Mamta (Tamannaah Bhatia) for Chhath Puja. The village sits beside a forbidden forest tied to local legend — the "Vvaan Devi" — and to a development project the village elders want pushed through despite generations of warnings to stay out of the woods. Rishi, naturally, becomes the reluctant chosen one dragged into confronting whatever's actually out there. Deepak Kumar Mishra directs from a script by Arunabh Kumar, with Maniesh Paul, Sunil Grover, Annup Sonii, and Shweta Tiwari filling out the supporting cast, and Shobha Kapoor, Ektaa R Kapoor, Arunabh Kumar, and Niraj Kothari producing.
That's the setup. What critics disagreed on wasn't the setup itself — it's what the film does with it.
Koimoi's take: 3.5/5, and a genre handled with a straight face
Koimoi's review, written by Trisha Gaur, is the more favorable of the two major takes out this weekend, landing at 3.5 out of 5. The core of Koimoi's praise is about tone: the review credits Mishra with handling the folklore-fantasy genre with real sincerity rather than tipping into camp, which is a harder needle to thread than it sounds in a genre that's produced plenty of unintentionally funny god-versus-demon spectacle over the years. Koimoi singles out Tamannaah Bhatia specifically as "the film's genuine anchor" — notable phrasing, since a lot of pre-release coverage (including this site's own) framed the film primarily around Malhotra's arc.
On Malhotra himself, Koimoi's read is more qualified but still positive: his character's journey from disbelief to devotion plays "with more conviction than you'd expect," even though the review flags that some of the emotional beats around that arc feel underdeveloped — praise with a real asterisk attached, rather than a clean rave.
The review also spends real time on the production's texture, describing the temple and village design as "raw, rustic," and comparing the overall storytelling feel to Amar Chitra Katha comics or the Panchatantra — a comparison that, if it lands the way Koimoi intends it, suggests the film successfully channels a specific, familiar Indian folk-storytelling register rather than just generic fantasy spectacle borrowed from elsewhere.
Where Koimoi pulls back is on two specific fronts: comic relief that reportedly undercuts the film's more serious stretches, and Sunil Grover's antagonist track, which the review says hits the beats you'd expect from that kind of role without ever genuinely surprising. That last point is worth sitting with given how much pre-release marketing leaned on Grover playing dramatically against type as a menacing figure named Deepak. A performance that's competent but predictable in a role built specifically to subvert audience expectations of the actor is a real letdown relative to what was promised.
Filmibeat's take: 2.5/5, and a promising premise that doesn't pay off
Filmibeat's review lands a full point lower, at 2.5 out of 5, under a headline that gets straight to the point: the film "misses the mark despite a promising premise." Where Koimoi credits the film's sincerity, Filmibeat's core complaint is structural — a slow, "dull" first half that the review says fails to actually build suspense around the central mystery, which is a serious problem for a film explicitly marketed as a mystery-thriller wrapped around mythology.
The sharper criticism is aimed at the screenplay itself. Filmibeat argues the mythological revelations the film is built around function as "convenient plot devices" rather than earned reveals — meaning the supernatural elements get explained away too quickly, robbing them of the mystery and dread a slow-burn folklore thriller depends on to actually work. That's close to the opposite problem from what Koimoi flagged: Koimoi's complaint was that some emotional beats feel underdeveloped, while Filmibeat's complaint is that the plot machinery resolves too fast and too conveniently once it does move.
It's not all negative, though, and it's worth being fair to where the two reviews actually overlap. Filmibeat singles out Sunil Grover's performance as a standout "despite script limits" — a notably different read from Koimoi's "hits expected beats without surprising," though both reviews agree Grover is working with material that doesn't fully serve him. Filmibeat also praises the Chhath Puja sequences specifically as well-shot, with music that fits the moment, and notes that the film's second half is noticeably better paced than its first — meaning the "dull first half, convenient reveals" critique isn't a blanket dismissal of the whole runtime, just the front half of it.
India.com's headline: a more positive lean, with a caveat
A third outlet, India.com, published a review with a headline suggesting a more positive overall take — one that frames the film as making its lead pairing "shine in this intriguing blend of mythology and mystery." Worth flagging clearly: only the headline is confirmed here, not the full text of the review, so it's fair to note India.com appears to lean positive on the film without attributing specific claims or reasoning to it beyond what that headline actually says. Three outlets, three different verdicts, is a genuinely accurate snapshot of where critical opinion on this film sits four days into release.
What the split actually tells you
Put the three takes side by side and a pattern emerges that's more useful than any single star rating. Nobody's calling The Vvaan a disaster, and nobody's calling it a clean triumph either. The consistent thread across Koimoi and Filmibeat — the two reviews with enough detail to actually compare — is that the film's ambition (real folklore roots, a first-time star pairing, a comic actor cast against type) is more interesting than its execution fully delivers on. Where the two reviews diverge is on which half of the film that shows up in: Koimoi finds more to like in the film's tone and performances holding the sincerity together throughout, while Filmibeat finds the back half recovers ground the front half squanders on pacing and convenient plotting.
That's a genuinely useful thing to know going into a viewing, and it's a more honest picture than either single rating on its own.
The box office: a weekend that grew instead of fading
Whatever critics made of it, The Vvaan opened to real numbers. According to Bollywood Hungama's tracking, the film brought in ₹7.25 crore net in India on Friday, September 25, then grew to ₹10.50 crore on Saturday and ₹14 crore on Sunday — a three-day opening weekend total of ₹31.75 crore net. Worldwide, Bollywood Hungama puts the gross at ₹39.74 crore, made up of ₹38.02 crore in India gross plus ₹1.72 crore from overseas.
The shape of that growth matters as much as the total. A film that opens at ₹7.25 crore and climbs to ₹14 crore by Sunday is showing exactly the pattern a distributor wants to see over a first weekend — occupancy building rather than collapsing. Bollywood Hungama's occupancy figures back that up directly: weekend occupancy grew from 20.31% on Friday to 36.30% by Sunday, which is a meaningfully steep climb for just three days.
It's worth noting, as with most Indian box-office reporting, that other trackers have published figures that don't line up precisely with Bollywood Hungama's numbers — a routine feature of trade reporting in this market, where net-versus-gross framing and which markets get counted can shift the totals from one outlet to another. Rather than blend those different figures into one claimed "true" number, Bollywood Hungama's tracking is the specific, internally consistent set used throughout this piece, and it's the more detailed of what's publicly available right now.
Per trade reporting, The Vvaan also released the same weekend as a theatrical re-release of Avengers: Endgame in Indian cinemas — a genuine curveball for a mid-scale mythological thriller to be sharing screens with, even if a nine-year-old Marvel re-release isn't drawing on quite the same audience The Vvaan is chasing. Given that detail comes from secondary trade reporting rather than a primary confirmed source, it's worth treating as context rather than a confirmed head-to-head battle for screens.
What it adds up to
A film that opens with a genuinely split critical reception and still grows its numbers across the weekend is, on balance, a decent outcome for a mid-scale mythological release that isn't backed by a pan-India star or an established franchise name. It's not the kind of opening that suggests a runaway hit in the making, but ₹31.75 crore net across three days with occupancy climbing rather than falling is a real foothold — enough to suggest word of mouth, even the mixed kind Koimoi and Filmibeat represent, isn't actively scaring people off.
Whether that foothold turns into legs through a second weekend is the more interesting question now. If Filmibeat's read is right and the film's back half genuinely plays better than its front half, word of mouth from people who stuck around for the second hour could help it hold. If Koimoi's read is right and the film's sincerity is the thing carrying it, that's a quieter, harder quality to market — the kind of thing that either builds slowly through recommendations or gets buried by louder competition in the weeks ahead. Either way, the numbers through the next full week will say more about which critical camp actually predicted the film's trajectory than either review does on its own.
Watch whether The Vvaan's second-weekend hold looks more like Filmibeat's slow-first-half read or Koimoi's sincere-genre-execution read, and whether Bollywood Hungama's numbers get revised as more trackers weigh in.