Hariom Kaushik
Lila
Overview
The story of migrant families who move to a village in Haryana in search of a better opportunity, but there, the women are forced to work as prostitutes, and the men sell drugs because of a village headman.
Cast
12 people
Reviews
2 min readRegret is the title. The village does not wait.
Ranjeet Chauhan's Malaal (2021) skips the welcome montage. Families arrive in dust. The village is already there, and it is hungry. The title is Hindi for "regret." Nobody on screen gets time for that feeling. Survival uses the whole clock.
The pause before the drowning is a bus that never quite becomes a scene. latestnetflix.com's take is that Chauhan does not film the last free breath as a set piece.He starts after the village has already closed. False hope would have been the easy first act. He skips it.
Chauhan has no interest in the village headman's inner life. The man who turns desperation into currency gets no wound and no late flinch of guilt. He is weather with a ledger.
The film is not about why a monster is a monster. It is about the machine that lets him work, and about the people who have to live inside it. Men get pushed into drug trafficking.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsSearch Malaal in 2021 and you probably got the wrong film.
Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2019 Hindi romance Malaal had Meezaan Jaffrey, Sharmin Segal, and a Mumbai chawl. This Malaal is a 113-minute Haryanvi crime drama written, directed, and produced by Ranjeet Chauhan. TMDB lists crime and drama, original language Punjabi, India release 1 October 2021. IMDb files the same runtime, language Haryanvi, and the plot in one paragraph. latestnetflix.com's take is that Migrant families move to a Haryana village for work.Women are forced into prostitution. Men sell drugs. A village headman runs both trades. 
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OTTplay logs a theatrical date of 1 February 2021 and an OTT date of 1 August 2021, months before the October TMDB card. Airtel Xstream carries it as a Chaupal title in Haryanvi audio. Chaupal is the regional streamer for Punjabi, Haryanvi, and Bhojpuri. Catalog scrapers later listed it on Netflix, which is how this page exists. Chauhan produced with Sushil Vashisth. Vikas K. Sharma shot it. Arvind Saini cut it. India rated it A. , , ,
The famous names sit in support, and that is the tell.
Yashpal Sharma, born in Hisar, Haryana, and known to Hindi audiences as Lakha in Lagaan, is on the call sheet. His earlier Haryanvi film Pagdi: The Honour already had a National Film Award. He later directed Dada Lakhmi, a 2022 biopic of folk poet Pandit Lakhmi Chand that took the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Haryanvi. Hindustan Times quoted him saying he refused at least 20 other projects over five years to finish that film. Putting him in Chauhan's village-headman story is a regional prestige borrow, not a Bollywood lead. Tina Bhatia, billed as Parveen in Zoya Akhtar's Gully Boy, is here too. Hariom Kaushik plays Lila. IMDbPro later tagged Kaushik and Yogesh Bhardwaj with RRR. Abhimanyu Yadav is billed as Ranjeet Singh. Mukesh Musafir is Raje. Akash Chawariya is Mukki. The village cop is Devender Giroh. , , , , ,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXu0ae7WUHI
Chaupal Haryanvi's YouTube still sells the film on Sharma's name. One clip is titled "Yashpal Sharma best ever Haryanvi movie Malaal." Another teases a sarpanch's verdict. The scores look loud until you count the votes. IMDb sits around 8.2 from a few dozen users. English trade press never picked the production up. TMDB even files the original language as Punjabi. IMDb and Airtel both say Haryanvi. A Lagaan actor in a village-headman plot, a Gully Boy extra in Haryanvi, and a title that keeps losing search traffic to a Bhansali romance. , , , ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.