In the landscape of early 2000s Hindi cinema, a film titled Durga —promoted with the tagline “Not Just a Love Story”—arrived with little fanfare in 2002. Sandwiched between the blockbuster Devdas and the trendsetting Saathiya , director Shoojit Sircar’s sophomore feature (long before Piku and Vicky Donor made him a household name) was largely dismissed as an uneven, low-budget romantic thriller. Yet, nearly two decades later, revisiting Durga in 2021 reveals a prescient, unsettling film that used the skeleton of a love story to dissect class violence, patriarchal paranoia, and the terrifying fragility of female autonomy.

The film is a 2002 Hindi-language romantic action drama that was also released as a Telugu film titled Soori (2000). It is characterized by its shift from a simple college romance to a violent underworld conflict. Plot Summary

In interviews looking back on the film's 23rd anniversary, Chakravarthy expressed that the film might have been "ahead of its time" and suggested it might have fared better in the current cinematic climate, where South-style action films are highly popular in the Hindi market. more details

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"Durga: It's Not Just a Love Story" is a 2002 Indian Hindi-language film directed by Mahesh Bhatt. The movie stars Pooja Bhatt, Siddharth Ray, and Surekha Puranik in leading roles.