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

Manithan Deivamagalam doesn’t start off as a repulsive collection of several funeral and sexual assault scenes stringed together. The first half of the film flows like a Tamil television serial, following a humble nongu seller (Selvaraghavan), his adorable friendship with a young girl, who he treats like his own daughter. By the time he gets married to a woman (Kushee Ravi) who “doesn’t care about his poverty or looks”, we know some Bala-esque tragedy is going to befall this happy family. Calling certain portions of the film a “Tamil serial” is by no means a critique, as they remain to be one of the few good things about it, because then you can recalibrate your expectations and watch it accordingly. But the film doesn’t let you do that because these qualities later mutate and make you realise how deliberately dated the scenes are. This is when you start wondering which aged-like-milk 80s Tamil rural entertainer this reminds you of. The answer is: all of them. The director resorts to old cliches you could only find in parodies of retro films. Want to show the hero’s wife is pregnant? Make him run to her after hearing how she mysteriously fainted. When he reaches the house panting and stressed out, she’s sitting there smiling, ready to deliver the “nalla seidhi” (good news). How bad is the bad guy? He is ‘drinking-and-smoking-in-a-dimly-lit-warehouse-while-girls-awkwardly-massage-him’ bad.

Dennis Manjunath constantly comes in the way of the story trying to make an impact. You cannot resist the impulse to blame the lacklustre performances on the direction as well, because the intensity definitely exists (especially with Kushee Ravi), but someone passionately singing off-key with gibberish lyrics still registers as a bizarre noise. Looking at the (several, lengthy) scenes of characters delivering dialogues while crying their heart out, it becomes clear that the directions given at those moments were just “cry, cry hard, now cry harder.” Manithan Deivamagalam also resorts to another time-honoured Tamil cinema tradition: Any film that focuses on sexual assault as the central plot should inevitably end with the hero tapping into his primal, animalistic instincts to rage out and kill the criminals in the most brutal way possible. Mindless empty catharsis is fine, but at the end, when Selvaraghavan’s character takes one more look at the video of the sexual assault to “hype himself up” for the final battle, that’s when you realise that maybe these empty catharsis in films aren’t as mindless or harmless after all. They show how dated our society is when it comes to understanding such complex issues.