Retta Thala Movie Review: Stuns you with breathtaking levels of soullessness

Every time a character trails off into a backstory-montage, we get a sloppily made AI video that already looks dated. It feels ridiculous to sit in a theatre to watch something someone made by essentially typing a few prompts on the screen. Maybe this is the future, and maybe we cannot entirely fault the makers for trying to make up for their lack of budget. But, even if you are a wide-eyed devotee of our algorithmic Gods, the AI-generated clips in Retta Thala would still leave you disappointed at the lack of originality in the prompts they typed out to create these clips. Breathtaking indolence aside, the most baffling thing about Retta Thala is not the AI clips but how everything around it, the ‘real’ scenes, feel like they were written by AI. How else would you explain everyone in the film looking like they walked straight out of H&M’s winter collection catalogue (the film happens in Pondicherry and Goa), or Siddhi Idnani’s character revealing her desire to move to France because she has crippling financial issues and is sick of her waitress job?

Director: Kris Thirukumaran
Cast: Arun Vijay, Siddhi Idnani, Tanya Ravichandran, Yogesh

There are specks of interesting writing like snow on asbestos. Every single character on screen is deeply flawed, corrupted by greed, and is almost irredeemable. When Kaali (Arun Vijay) sits down to talk with his look-alike Malpe Upendra (also Arun Vijay), we see the frame expand to reveal the painting ‘Dante and Virgil in Hell’, which depicts two damned souls intertwined in eternal combat, foreshadowing their fate. But for any of this to connect, we should care about the characters, which sadly never happens. When Kaali meets his childhood sweetheart after years, their stiff demeanour and artificial dialogue exchange make the entire scene feel awkward. When he suddenly asks her for a kiss in the middle of a conversation, it is neither romantic or creepy but just plain awkward, because of how tonally out of place it is and how disinterested both the actors looked. Throughout the film, you could feel a sense of unintended eeriness. Upon reflection, it seems that it might be due to the lack of background characters in any scene to fill the atmosphere. There are no customers in a cafe, barely any cars on the road, no passengers or even homeless people in the railway station or any sign of life other than what the story permits. The lack of extras makes the world of Retta Thala feel sterile and uncanny.

Once again, John Vijay plays a perverted policeman who delivers sleazy lines to every female character in the film. It is neither funny nor intimidating or crucial to the story, and yet, we are made to endure. Arun Vijay’s Kaali is willing to perform extreme acts of crime and violence to satisfy the love of his life, and yet every line spoken and every glance shared between them has the spark of a wet mop. The fact that the actors sometimes try hard to make the abysmal dialogues work ironically makes the whole affair that much messier. There are familiar elements throughout the film, and none more striking than Malpe Upendra’s backstory, which reminds us of the first John Wick with how the villain’s henchman warns his bosses about Upendra after they unwittingly steal his car. There are extreme efforts to make everything and everyone look stylish, but by the time a speeding car launches Arun Vijay into the air, only for him to do the “superhero landing” with the cigarette still in his mouth, the film gives you several other things to worry about. Apparently, going for the famous Hip-Hop gangster look of ‘dreadlocks and grillz’, Arun Vijay is made to wear dental braces instead of the teeth grillz; hilarious. We almost pity the man when he is forced to look into the camera and say, “I am a rare edition.”  

Maybe the AI clips in the film are not to be criticised in isolation, as they seem to have the same level of thought and effort put into the rest of the film. The debates around AI killing creativity and originality rage on. But when the singularity arrives, and AI finally achieves consciousness, it might snarkily retort that we didn’t leave enough for it to kill.