Faith, Satire, and the Divided Audience: A Thematic Analysis of IMDb Reviews of the Bollywood Film PK (2014)

Abstract

This study examines how IMDb reviewers construct, negotiate, and contest the religious and social meanings of PK (Hirani, 2014), one of Bollywood’s most commercially successful and publicly disputed films. While existing scholarship has mainly examined PK through textual, political, or institutional lenses, less attention has been paid to how ordinary viewers interpret its critique of religion, superstition, godmen, and organised faith in digital review spaces. Using reflexive thematic analysis, this study analyses IMDb user reviews as naturalistic audience discourse and treats reviewer language as a site of public meaning-making. The analysis identifies three major patterns. First, many reviewers read PK as a courageous critique of religious intermediaries, blind faith, and exploitative godmen, while others reject the film as selectively critical of Hinduism. Second, reviewers interpret the film’s comedy, emotion, and satire as central to its social communication, though some argue that Bollywood conventions dilute its critical force. Third, polarised responses emerge through competing registers of praise, religious offense, moral disagreement, and aesthetic criticism. These findings show that PK’s reception cannot be reduced to taste or entertainment value; it reflects wider struggles over secularism, religious identity, and cultural politics in contemporary India. The study contributes to Bollywood reception research by demonstrating the value of IMDb reviews for analysing how digital audiences publicly debate socially provocative cinema.