Series of ‘reveals’ that never end

Stills from the Tamil-language thrillers Maharaja

Maharaja is the warm, genteel actor Vijay Sethupathi's 50th film. We know this, not from IMDb, but from "VJS 50" splashed in the film's trailer, poster, opening credits!

I wonder if that number separately includes the Hindi and Tamil versions of Sriram Raghavan's equally smart, suspense-thriller, Merry Christmas (2024).

I watched both versions in a theatre, mildly bemoaning a missed opportunity. Merry Christmas, in Tamil, could've so easily been set in Chennai (for the exterior sequences), with the same cast.

The story's roughly the same, anyway. It felt odd for characters to be interacting in Tamil, all over again, in Mumbai.

Kurangu Bommai

Almost as odd to find Anurag Kashyap in Maharaja, mouthing words dubbed by someone else in Tamil, while even his lips don't sync with lines on screen, on occasion.

Which was okay for, say, a cameo in Loki's Leo (2023) for Kashyap (AK vs AK, Ghoomketu) - who's been quietly building a parallel acting career, along with a well-known filmography as director, of course.

Maharaja is ironically his first film to surpass Rs 100 crore in footfalls! Wherein Sethupathi plays the eponymous lead/hero - Kashyap as Selvam, is the main villain. Nothing feels even slightly sloppy about the film, otherwise; written, directed by Vellore-born Nithilan Saminathan, 42.

I missed catching Maharaja at a theatre, without regretting it much, to be honest. Knowing that it was killing it at the box-office.

And that, more often than not, could signify a pulpy Tamil actioner, with OTT stunts and loud background score - simply competing with the chaos and cacophony inside the crowded cinema. Some of that is true for Maharaja.

But the movie (now on Netflix) holds your attention, through and through, not so much for its genre tropes, as its sharp writing - that draws you in, first, with a question as elemental as, say, ‘Katappa ne Baahubali ko kyun maara' in S S Rajamouli's Telugu blockbuster's sequel.

Namely, in Maharaja, what/who is Lakshmi? Lakshmi is a dustbin, that's got stolen from Maharaja's house.

Nithilan Saminathan

This robbery of sorts has shaken up the hero enough to lodge a police complaint - sit it out over days at an oppressive police station, even demand a CBI inquiry, offering his life's savings as bribe, for cops to investigate a seemingly silly case!

Movie-buffs will label this object - an excuse in a film, through a chase around which the plot evolves - MacGuffin. In Nithalan's Kurangu Bommai (2017; Zee5), that MacGuffin is a gold statue of Natraj, from Tanjore, as the script similarly teases/plays with (non-linear) timelines.

Besides the protagonist from the working-classes - barber/‘hajaam' in Maharaja; taxi-driver in Kurangu - what unites the two films is how, practically all the characters are prone to extreme deceit, driven by greed alone. It's a dark/cynical, rather than a prescriptive/normative, take on the world, as it is.

After a double-bill of Nithilan's features, I just had to call him up to say, hello; and bravo! "My English is poor; hope I can answer your questions," Nithilan tells me.

Well, the answer is resolutely in his scripts/movies, that unravel from a trigger point, into a series of non-stop reveals, that simply never end - or eventually do, with the most uncomfortable jolt - while you'd been seamlessly hooked, wondering what happens next, rather than why, or how, in a narrative full of accidents and coincidences.

Very Innaritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams), if you may. Nithilan's adopted first name on WhatsApp, also his YouTube channel, is Akira - after Kurosawa. You can see why.

As also with the short film that won him Best Director at a popular TV contest (Naalaya Iyakunar), Nithilan says the inspiration behind his scripting is: "Match the following."

Meaning? That popular puzzle, where you connect questions on one side of an exam paper, with answers on the other! "So, you start with dustbin missing [left-hand side] and join it with an answer [on the right]," and so on.

It took Chennai-based Nithilan seven years to film his second feature because, he admits, "I don't sit and consistently write [on a desk]. Ideas come to me - and they've got be next-level, na - when I'm reading, watching, playing…" Living, basically.

The thought behind Maharaja that Nithilan considers, foremost, a "simple revenge story", came to him first from a news report.

Where he takes it to is ‘next-level' enough that in another age, not long ago, as with, perhaps Vikram Vedha (2017) - producers in Bombay would've simply remade Maharaja in Lucknow, replacing the leads with Bollywood actors. That won't be necessary.

Nithilan says he had the toughest time casting for the villain in Maharaja. All the character-actors he approached in Chennai had declined this role - so purely evil, with a conclusion in the climax that confounds further than it sheds light on him, still.

He'd been meaning to onboard Kashyap, anyway. They connected, finally. Kashyap agreed.

What this villainous character has heralded, I notice online, is some serious discussions on the sheer grotesquery in the film's ending - what it perhaps says, and whether it was warranted at all. "Some points, I agree with critics. Some points, I don't," Nithilan sweetly points out.

What's got his goat actually is the ending getting compared to Park Chan-wook's Korean Oldboy (2003), even Rohit Krishnan's Malayalam Iratta (2023). "That is just not fair," Nithilan says. I agree.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.