Maatr movie review: This Raveena Tandon film is jaw-droppingly horrifying

In fact, much of it is jaw-droppingly horrifying. A cop, observing the scene of the crime says: ‘PM desh ko shape karne ki baat kar rahe hain, aur yeh rape ki baat kar rahi hai’. Seriously? Who writes these lines?

There’ve been countless films made on this theme, which tie in standard strands of police procedural — crime thriller — rape-revenge fantasy, and we’ve come away from them disturbed, in the right way, to see how naked power and aggression can slam the victims to the ground, their legitimate pain never being acknowledged or addressed.

Those involved in creating a woman like Vidya Chauhan (Raveena Tandon) who rises from the ashes to hunt out the gang of rapists — a politician’s loutish son (Madhur Mittal) and his hangers-on who operate from a Delhi farmhouse — should have been careful of what they were stepping into. Especially when you are setting the film in the Capital, which hasn’t forgotten that brutalised girl in the bus, on that December night.

And that extends to the leading lady, a Bollywood veteran, a woman with privilege, and a likeable actor who has a respectable CV: Tandon’s ‘zakhmi aurat’ is the result of good intentions marred by thoughtless execution.