Shakun Batra got abusive mails after 'Gehraiyaan' release

The much-maligned Deepika Padukone starrer, ‘Gehraiyaan’, has been receiving a lot of flak since its release on Amazon Prime Video. The film, which explores the tempestuous relationship between two millennials, who are cheating on their respective partners, has been heavily panned. Few critics have also liked it trying not to delve too deep into the plot or the characters in the film.

Recently, Padukone too went ahead and hosted a success party for which she was trolled.

Meanwhile, Gehraiyaan director Shakun Batra said in a recent interview that he had received an abusive email after the film’s release. He revealed that he had an e-mail where the subject was B****d (a Hindi cuss word). The person who sent the mail just said, ‘B****d picture banani nahi aati hai to kyun banata hai? Kuch aur kar leta (If you don’t know how to make a film, why do you? Do something else).”

However, Batra, who had earlier made the well-received Kapoor & Sons, and was assistant director in films like Rock On! admitted that he had also got positive emails that encouraged him. Reportedly, he got an email from a psychologist in Brisbane who said the psychology of the characters really added up for him and that he had felt the “cognitive dissonance”.

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Apparently, the director has made peace with these two opposing views about his film in his mind. He doesn’t know how it happened but he thinks that he would like to forget about the movie and he thinks he has grown to have accepted the polarisation.

However, in her interviews to the media, Padukone said that her parents were extremely proud of her after watching Gehraiyaan. They found it a little difficult to disassociate her as a person from the actor.

In the film, Padukone’s character, who is a mentally disturbed person due to traumatic events in her childhood, embarks on a relationship with her cousin’s fiancée (played by Siddhant Chaturvedi). She is also in a relationship with a writer but leaves him and finds herself waiting for Siddhant, caught up in a deep financial mess, to break up with her cousin (Ananya Pandey).

Padukone said that her roles does affect her parents. They are her family, and it does affect them, but they were extremely appreciative and proud of her performance, she stressed.