Rathish Ambat’s ‘Theerppu’, starring Prithviraj Sukumaran, is a genre thriller that drowns under its ideology

Posted on August 26, 2022

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Spoilers ahead…

The film is so overstuffed with symbolism that the main narrative feels like an afterthought retrofitted into an ideological template.

theerpu prithviraj

In quite a few ways, Theerpu, the new film by director Rathish Ambat and writer Muraly Gopy, feels like a sequel in spirit to their earlier work, Kammara Sambhavam. For one, there’s the overall feel of wanting to stretch the limits of the material. Kammara Sambhavam was a meta-masala movie, where a real-life character who is thought to be evil (like MN Nambiar) is deified on screen as a god (like MGR). The subtext was about how history is nothing but a series of lies that become the “truth” over a period of time. The first half of the film was the actual history of the protagonist. The second half, where his life is made into a movie, is the lie that becomes history over time – because people die but movies (and other records) live forever. Theerpu is more of a genre movie: a home-invasion thriller. But again, the limits are stretched. It is also a revenge drama. (And like Kammara Sambhavam, it takes a really long time to get to the point.)

You can read the rest of the review here:

https://www.galatta.com/malayalam/movie/review/theerppu/

And you can watch the video review here:

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Posted in: Cinema: Malayalam