Director Varsha Bharath’s debut feature, Bad Girl, is gearing up for release this Friday. Meanwhile, on Monday, the film cleared censorship formalities, receiving a U/A certificate from the Central Board for Film Certification (CBFC), which allows children above the age of 16 to visit the theatres along with their parents.
However, the censor certificate also reveals certain heavy censorship moves. For instance, several profanities have been muted in the film. Similarly, a few intimate visuals, around 20%, have been trimmed from Bad Girl. The film’s overall runtime is 112 minutes, which is around 1 hour and 52 minutes.
The film’s U/A certification comes after the film’s teaser glimpse that divided the internet, as some welcomed it for normalising the age-appropriate curiosities of a teen girl, while others condemned it as 'perversion' and sexualising the children.
Bad Girl is the directorial debut of Varsha Bharath and is backed by directors Vetri Maaran and Anurag Kashyap. The film won the NETPAC (Network for Promotion of Asian Cinema) Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2025, where it held its world premiere.
Anjali Sivaraman leads the cast of Bad Girl, which also includes Hridhu Haroon, TeeJay Arunasalam, Saranya Ravichandran, Shanthi Priya, and Sashank Bommireddipalli. Anjali made her debut with Netflix's Class, which is an adaptation of the streamer's own Spanish drama Elite.
Acclaimed composer Amit Trivedi is composing the music for the film. The rest of the crew of Bad Girl includes Preetha Jayaraman, Jagadeesh Ravi, and Prince Anderson as the cinematographers, Radha Sridhar as the editor, and V Shanmugaraja as the production designer. Notably, the film also has an intimacy co-ordinator, Jayalakshmi Sundaresan, on its crew. Vikrem Vybav RS serves as an executive producer on the film.
