Manithan Deivamagalam Movie Review:
Even as someone who supports a creator’s right for artistic expression, to depict traumatic incidents however they see fit, Manithan Deivamagalam leaves you dumbfounded. The Dennis Manjunath directorial is based on the real-life incidents of a financier sexually assaulting women debtors who failed to repay him. While the subject of the film is harrowing on its own, the director goes above and beyond to spell out, underline, highlight, and amp up the agony of the victims in long, drawn-out sequences. It makes one wonder if the filmmakers who resort to such dramatisations believe that the audiences are incapable of basic empathy or do not have the mental capacity to understand how exactly these crimes are bad. After the fifth time we see the villain coerce a wailing victim into sleeping with him, we feel exhausted at the film’s ceaseless attempts to hammer home the same point in the same way. It is not just sexual assault; the director also resorts to the classic Tamil cinema trope of funeral scenes. There are around three different instances where we see characters crying around a dead body, perform the religious rites, light the funeral pyre, forlornly look at the roaring fire, and then walk away. There is a deeper level to this sympathy milking: roughly 60 percent of the scenes are just people crying and delivering dialogues through tears. Maybe the percentage isn’t an exact figure, but it definitely felt like it, which only adds to the point of how gruelling it was to sit through.
Director: Dennis Manjunath
Cast: Selvaraghavan, Kushee Ravi, Kowsalya, Mime Gopi
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