Maharaja

A barber seeks vengeance after his home is burglarized, cryptically telling police his "lakshmi" has been taken, leaving them uncertain if it's a person or object. His quest to recover the elusive "lakshmi" unfolds.

Release date: June 14, 2024 (India)

Director: Nithilan Swaminathan

A morbid sense of dread tirelessly pulses through the two films that director Nithilan Saminathan has made till now. In these films, even the morally-right get easily corrupted as they face ordinary humans in their most perverse form. In Maharaja, when a group of robbers loot houses and do unspeakable deeds, they don’t miss out on the opportunity to cook themselves a hot meal.

It’s not the ideas or the situations that are meant to grip you, but more by how they are executed; Nithilan meticulously works on the writing to show evil as banally as possible. When the camera introduces us to Selvam (Anurag Kashyap), he’s talking about onions to his friend in the kitchen, with a zoom-out revealing the women who are tied up next to him — a shot reminiscent of the opening of 2017’s Kurangu Bommai, Nithilan’s first film.

This is no mere coincidence; Nithilan consciously rehashes some of his tropes and educates us on the filmmaking style he wishes to follow. He often turns to the uncertainty of life to connect plot points: a ceiling fan might fall on your head, snakes might appear out of nowhere, or a lorry might crash into your house. There is an effort to play on the audiences’ minds by juxtaposing timelines, and a specific object becomes a motif to pivot the story around — like the bag with a monkey face in his first film, there’s a trash can in Maharaja that is meant to pose a question: just because you deem something useless, does it lose its value?