Sometimes you wonder if social media has made filmmaking more difficult. In this world as it is now, audiences are inundated with content – a lot of it is stories. Many people have the opportunity to tell their side of the story (if they want) thanks to social media and the internet as a whole. This means that films these days have to be more than just documenting the everyday lives of normal people, because amateur narrators on social media are already doing a good job of that.
So if you look at that current film “Bad Girl” (Tamil, 2025, dir. Varsha Bharath) seemed legitimate to wonder if the room was calling Women tell women’s stories needs to take some bold steps forward, especially because of the stories already being told by real women on social media.
Many of those who have participated in feminist discourse already know that a “bad girl” is just a normal girl. A normal person. A person who breathes, lives and takes up space. If she’s a she, she’s a bad girl. Now make her an Indian girl from a conservative family and the implications become clearer. Their bodies, their thoughts, their desires, their choices, and their existence can all be sins. This is a lived reality for many Indian girls and women.
It is tempting to use “unpopular opinions” as a disclaimer here, as is often the case when people express relatively safe and commonplace opinions on the Internet. Suffice it to say that Ramya S., the protagonist of “Bad Girl,” is not the bad girl she is portrayed to be.
“Bad Girl” is a coming-of-age story. The audience sees Ramya S’s teenage hormonal angst as she discovers boys. She goes to college and discovers alcohol and more boys. She gets a job and has more bad friends. Ramya is annoyed that her mother and grandmother are strict and conservative. However, the film doesn’t reveal whether she feels equally strongly for her father, who doesn’t think much of his mother being mean to his wife, or whether she waits to be served water and food because he takes the women in his life for granted.
Ramya’s grief is neither new nor difficult to understand. Your school is suffocating. Her parents are Orthodox. But she gets to sit in a chair with her legs up while she logs onto the internet (this is the early 2000s) and chats with a boy while her grandmother feeds her with her own hands. Indian households can be strange for Indian girls. Love and discrimination are intertwined in ways that make it difficult to know where one begins and the other ends. The setup makes it easier to blame the very women who are victims of the system and forgive the men who reinforce it.
Young Ramya’s school life is not difficult in itself. It’s mediocre. It’s mostly uneventful, aside from a somewhat legitimate teenage romance that’s cut short by adult interference. She comes into conflict with her parents, especially her mother, as she continues on her path of being unloved by insignificant men. Your journey is relatable. Older women will recognize nuances of the mistakes they themselves have made as they witness the Ramya spiral and make poor decisions.
Although the film is entertaining and well made, one wonders why Ramya is a bad girl in the first place. That’s probably exactly what the filmmaker wants to convey: in this patriarchal reality, all women are bad girls. But can the bar for being a bad girl be so low when feminists set it for themselves?
Over the course of the film, the viewer hardly gets to know anyone else in Ramya’s world. The spotlight is always on Ramya. The audience sees their world through their eyes, as they should. And because the viewer has the opportunity to sit next to her during each of her breakups, it looks like she’s not a bad girl for having premarital sex and drinking alcohol. Instead, she might be a bad person because she seems completely incapable of looking up from her own dreary problems and thinking about anyone else.
As the story progresses with her, the question actually arises: How much can one empathize with an English-speaking, petite, light-skinned, upper-caste, middle-class urban woman with friends who care about her well-being and a job that seems to pay the bills? As a teenager she has convenient access to a cell phone, as a student to alcohol and sex, and as a woman in her thirties to her own apartment and curly hair cream.
Then what really is the problem?
At best, Ramya’s life is ordinary. She is like everyone else. She blames her mother for her problems. The decisions she makes are cliched and her consequences are equally poor. Not once does the audience see her showing up for her friends, who look out for her every time she’s distressed. On the contrary, she actively ignores their sensible guidance and continues to make poor decisions. By the end, you get tired of Ramya and her non-problems. The bad girl begins to transform into a boring girl who seems to be in denial of her own privileges, lack of problem-solving skills, and mediocrity.
Maybe this is the great coming of age story for many women who grew up dealing with and understanding the patriarchy. Many adult women have reached a point where they realize that the patriarchy remains, but what can definitely change is their definition of what a bad girl is. And how they choose to live their lives as a unit. One only has to spend enough time on the internet to learn that there are so many different types of women on this journey, navigating the patriarchy using every tool and knowledge at their disposal.
Feminists agree, disagree, and agree to disagree. Many feminists have also come to the realization that there is no right way to do feminism. Acknowledging your own privilege and internalized misogyny could be a start if you want to start. The enemy is not a person, a structure or a thought. It’s so much more than all of this put together. And much of the fight is without pomp and fairness. It is mundane, much like Ramya’s life.
And if that’s the case, the proverbial bad girl may need to up her game a bit if she wants to get to a better place. This is why the movie “Bad Girl” feels like a missed opportunity, repeating a story that has been told and shared many times before rather than delving into where the bad girl in real women actually lives.
Remya Sasindran is a feminist, development communications expert and film buff. In that order.
