Kaantha Review

Life imitates art in Selvamani Selvaraj's dramatic thriller about a hero, a director and the heroine stuck between them. The director in question, Ayya (Samuthirakani), is making his passion project "Shaantha", a biopic on his mother's tragic life. To his disappointment, he has to work with T K Mahadevan (Dulquer Salmaan), a superstar who was once his mentee.

Most of Kaantha plays out on the sets of Ayya's film, Shaantha. From the very first day, tensions spike. Mahadevan strolls in and immediately reshapes his scenes to fit his brand image, while Ayya fumes quietly in a corner, watching his former pupil overshadow him. Caught in the crossfire is Kumari (Bhagyasri Borse), the ingénue who Ayya is grooming with the same obsessive care he once gave Mahadevan. When Kumari and the very-much-married Mahadevan start falling for each other on the sets of their film, the already-fraught dynamic between the two men dissolves further.

One can appreciate the cleverness of Selvaraj's Russian-doll story format, but the film is brought down by its lousy screenplay. The first half is a slow-moving melodrama where neither Mahadevan and Kumari's romance nor Ayya and Mahadevan's rivalry are properly developed. Truncated love scenes pop up between tense face-offs, giving the whole thing a disjointed, stop-start rhythm. Somehow the film manages to feel both overindulgent and undercooked, in a paradox that only messy screenplays like this can achieve.

In the second half, as the energy wanes, a character is killed off, and the film morphs into a detective thriller. A flamboyant investigator (Rana Daggubati) marches onto the film set which is the scene of the murder, and begins to interrogate the cast and crew to uncloak the murderer. The sharp change in tone from a Mahanati-style of on-set-romance to a Knives Out-style whodunit is a bewildering but welcome relief from the previous monotony. Towards the end, though, the film's central themes about the corrosive effects of professional envy are barely discernible.

And yet, there's real craft peeking through the cracks. Dani Sanchez-Lopez's fever-dream cinematography is consistently striking, the background score has a weirdly modern, insistent quality, and the performances go all-out. Bhagyasri Borse is captivating as Kumari, a star-making role that gives her plenty of acting elbow room as the heroine of Kaantha and Shaantha. In many ways she is reminiscent of Keerthi Suresh in Mahanati.

Dulquer Salmaan's outsize screen presence does the impossible task of holding together the piecemeal story. Salmaan is undeniably good at both ends of the acting spectrum, from being able to convincingly ham it up as an old-school movie star one minute, to also playing soft, puppy-dog eyes at Kumari the next minute. Ironically, he's so good that he makes Samuthirakani's underwritten character feel even thinner, which in turn makes their "rivalry" surprisingly hard to take seriously.

For a brief time, Rana Daggubati's entrance, in which he does his best Benoit Blanc impression - if Blanc was also prone to a touch of sadism - is actually fun to watch, even if it means that the film's been side-tracked beyond repair.

You can sense an ambitious, almost experimental vision at Kaantha's inception. But somewhere along the way, the film becomes tangled in its own tricks. It doesn't collapse spectacularly so much as derail in slow motion, each expectation slightly thwarted. There are moments when it feels like a redeeming scene is just around the corner, but by the time the puzzle finally comes together, it's far too late.