Vijay Sethupathi starrer Maharaja is a brilliant script on the big screen living up to the audiences’ expectation

The recent trend of movies that are coming out of both the Malayalam and Tamil movie industries is setting the benchmark for Indian movies. Film critic Shubhra Gupta opines, “Each film is a testament to its time,” and rightly so. If we are to study the movies made in Hindi in the last decade, we can broadly categorise them into remakes and nationalistic movies. The urge to watch original content led me to discover a movie on Prime Videos in 2020 titled C U Soon (Malayalam), and there was no coming back.

Maharaja was on my wishlist ever since I watched the teaser. I finally went to the theatre thinking that it should be in the original language with subtitles. To my utter amusement, although the movie was in Tamil but devoid of subtitles, I trusted my skill of understanding the language in bits and pieces accrued from watching numerous Tamil movies. 

Maharaja is the story of a barber played by Vijay Sethupathi in the titular role, written and directed by Nithilan Saminathan. Vijay Sethupathi is lovingly called Makkal Selvan (People’s Man) in Tamil for his simplicity on and off the screen. This movie was very much in sync with the sobriquet. A widowed barber who lives with his daughter Jyothi goes to the nearby police station one day to file an FIR for “Lakshmi,” who was missing following a burglary at his home. 

Initially, the police officials were reluctant to file a report. But his steadfastness to lodge a complaint about it is apparent from his adamancy about not leaving the police station, come what may. Slowly and gradually, the story unfolds, and everyone around the case comes to know that it was more than a missing case.

It’s a story of revenge, helplessness, and sheer resilience. Anurag Kashyap, a robber and dacoit, is a sinisterous character whom you cannot help but hate. The flawless interconnectedness is praiseworthy on the part of the writer. There are police, dacoits, crime, vengeance, and more. This is a movie you do not want to miss if you are not heavily inclined towards remakes or jingoistic movies. 

When the director and the writer happen to be one and the same, the outcome of such a cinematic project often succeeds in catering to the audience. 

When a movie does well, it invariably becomes part of the actor’s success story, but we often forget that hundreds of people are involved in converting a script from a spiral to the big screen. In this movie, every single individual deserves applause for giving audiences a sense of satisfaction at the end of two and a half hours. However, having a subtitle would mean a greater reach amongst cinegoers. Hopefully, they do so in their OTT release. I would recommend you watch it if you are a cinephile.