Starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Rajkummar Rao, and Adarsh Gourav, the Ramin Bahrani-directed film, The White Tiger, is based on Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker prize-winning novel by the same name. Priyanka and Rajkummar play the roles of a rich, US-returned married couple. They belong to an affluent business family of the city.

Adarsh plays the role of their poor driver, Balram Halwai, and the story shows how he uses his intellect and wit to break away from the shackles of poverty. When the trailer was released, we were sure that it’s going to be a hard-hitting story that highlights the class divide in the Indian society.

Here’s the trailer:

And with the critics' reviews now out, we are really looking forward to January 22.

Here are the first reviews:

1. Variety’s Owen Gilberman: “Bahrani is no feel-good fantasist. The White Tiger taps engagingly into the rags-to-riches, Horatio-Alger-on-the-Ganges mythology that made Slumdog Millionaire a global sensation, but the movie also recognizes the earlier film as a fairy tale, positioning itself in key ways as the anti-Slumdog.” 

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2. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney: “The sting of underclass payback doesn’t rival that of, say, Parasite, but the movie taps into the same simmering rage of the have-nots, shafted out of an unyielding system in a perilously unbalanced world. It could almost be considered the anti-Slumdog Millionaire.”

3. Entertainment Weekly’s Leah Greenblatt introduced Adrash as, “largely unknown actor whose soulful combination of sheer will and vulnerability should, in a just world, win him the kind of accolades that helped make Slumdog’s Dev Patel a star.” 

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4. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw: “The White Tiger is a story of servitude, resentment, and love – and what its hero calls “the contented smile that comes to the lips of a servant who has done his duty by his master.”

5. Indiewire’s David Ehrlich: “Bahrani’s jagged sense of purpose and his street-level point-of-view allow him to attack this material with the same blunt force of Adiga’s book, and to suffuse it with the sights and sounds required to bring it all to life. Some are putrid, others intoxicating, but together they alchemize into a heady perfume of desperation that only wears off once the action slows down and shit gets real.”

After going through these powerful reviews, we are sure that you all must be looking forward to its release as much as we are.

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