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?
His characters also have unusual idiosyncrasies. A notorious murderer plays street cricket with kids, or like in this film, a gangster, a hard-core fan of Kunal Singh, beats up a man for not watching Punnagai Desam, and for losing the sunglasses that the late actor gifted him (!). Kalki Raja, who played a thief in the first film, returns as a thief named ‘Police’ who steals TVS 50s because… he can’t drive geared vehicles.
Maharaja (Tamil)
All of this is to imbue the film with a lot of dark humour, as is evident in the scene that kickstarts the story; Vijay Sethupathi’s titular lead, a man with a bandaged ear, enters a police station with an unusual complaint: his home was looted the previous night and he’s lost his valuable ‘Lakshmi,’ an iron-made trash can that saved the life of his daughter in an accident. Maharaja is even willing to pay Rs. 7 lakhs to the Inspector of Police, Varadharajan (Natty), confirming the suspicion that the complaint is a mere ruse for something more. Natty and co. take the bait with the hope of double-crossing Maharaja eventually.
The proceedings in the police station are intercut with all that happens in the life of Maharaja’s teenage daughter, Kashyap’s character of Selvam, and the flashbacks meant to piece things together. The writer in Nithilan builds this world and jumps across timelines, while also meticulously plotting some set-ups and pay-offs; like a shot featuring Varadharajan’s family or when Maharaja takes leave to go shopping, only for the shop to be just opposite his house.
A still from ‘Maharaja’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
However, sometimes, with such careful plotting, the convenience in writing gets to you, especially in the later portions of the film. The bigger issue is how the final act — the ‘prestige’ in Nithilan’s grand magic act — is written. All the effort to withhold information and create tension comes with a sudden turn of events — written for a specific reaction from the audience — but the idea that propels this moment is such a cliché in Tamil cinema that it comes close to turning the tables for Maharaja. You wonder if all the world-building, intricate writing and character-building was only a ruse to tell the story of an ordinary revenge-thriller.
And yet, what positions the film, especially with Anurag’s pathetic lip-sync driving one mad, is Vijay Sethupathi’s performance. In his 50th outing, the actor gets under the skin of this fascinating character with awe-inspiring ease and delivers quite a few stand-out scenes for us to cherish.
Maharaja is yet another sign of the serious filmmaker Nithilan is, and shows us how a good writer can convert even a dated idea into a gripping big-screen experience.
Maharaja is currently running in theatres
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