‘Maharaja’ movie review: Vijay Sethupathi shines in Nithilan Saminathan’s thriller

A scene from ‘Maharaja’ | Photo Credit: Junglee Music Tamil/YouTube

A morbid sense of dread continues to loom large in the two films that director Nithilan Saminathan has made so far. In these films, even morally upright people are easily corrupted as they encounter ordinary humans at their most perverted. KingWhen a group of robbers loot houses and commit inhuman acts, they do not miss the opportunity to cook a hot meal for themselves.

It is not the ideas or situations that grip you, but how they are executed; Nithilan has worked carefully on the writing to make evil appear as normal as possible. When the camera introduces us to Selvam (Anurag Kashyap), he is talking to his friend about onions in the kitchen, the zoom-out shows the tied-up women next to him – a shot that reminds one of the beginning of 2017 Kurangu BommaiDebut film of Nithilan.

This is no coincidence; Nithilan deliberately repeats some of his tropes and educates us about the filmmaking style he wants to follow. He often turns to the uncertainty of life to connect plot points: a ceiling fan can fall on your head, a snake can come out of nowhere, or a truck can ram into your house. An attempt is made to play on the mind of the audience by connecting timelines, and a specific object becomes a motif to twist the story – like the bag with the monkey face in his first film, it is a dustbin in the film. King This means raising the question: just because You Does something lose its value if it is considered useless?

There is a strange quirkiness to his characters as well. A notorious killer plays street cricket with kids, or like in this film, a gangster, who is a die-hard Kunal Singh fan, beats up a man because he is not watching the film. Punnagai Desam, And for losing the sunglasses that the late actor had gifted him (!). Kalki Raja, who played a thief in the first film, returns as a thief called ‘Police’ who steals a TVS 50 because… he can’t drive a geared vehicle.

All this is done to infuse the film with a lot of dark humour, as is evident in the scene that opens the story; Vijay Sethupathi’s lead character, a man with a bandage over his ear, enters the police station with an unusual complaint: his house was robbed the previous night and he has lost his precious ‘Lakshmi’, an iron-made garbage container that saved his daughter’s life in an accident. The Maharaja is also willing to pay Rs 7 lakh to Police Inspector Varadarajan (Natty), giving rise to suspicions that the complaint is merely a ploy to get something else. Natty and companions eventually fall into a trap, hoping to deceive the Maharaja.

The proceedings in the police station are intertwined with all the events happening in the life of the Maharaja’s teenage daughter, Kashyap’s Selvam’s character, and the flashbacks are intended to tie things together. The writer in Nithilan builds this world and moves across timelines, while also carefully planning certain set-ups and pay-offs; like the shot showing Varadarajan’s family or when the Maharaja takes a break to go shopping, the shop is right in front of his house.

A scene from ‘Maharaja’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

However, at times, with such a carefully constructed plot, the convenience in the writing bothers you, especially in the later parts of the film. The bigger issue is how the final scene – the ‘consecration’ in Nithilan’s grand magic feat – is written. All the effort to hide information and build tension comes to naught with a sudden turn of events – written for a specific reaction from the audience – but the idea that leads to this moment is so clichéd in Tamil cinema that it comes close to turning the tables KingYou wonder if all the world-building, complex writing and character-building was just an excuse to tell a simple revenge-thriller story.

And yet, what sets the film apart, especially with Anurag’s pathetic lip-sync, is Vijay Sethupathi’s performance. In his 50th film, the actor has played this charming character with astonishing ease and has given us some great scenes.

King This is another sign of Nithilan being a serious filmmaker, and shows us how a good writer can turn even a clichéd idea into an entertaining big screen experience.

Maharaja is currently running in cinemas