Mithra Mandali movie review:
Well, it’s slightly tragic watching a comedy trying very hard to be funny. Mithra Mandali doesn’t come from a lived-in sense of humour, it comes from the idea of what’s funny right now, meme culture, YouTube banter, Anudeep-style farce, and a desperate faith that chaos equals comedy. You can hear the makers screaming, “You will see that we can be crazy too,” then making a meme reaction video of their film and presenting it as the final product.
Director: Vijayender S
Cast: Priyadarshi, Niharika NM, Rag Mayur, Vishnu Oi, Prasad Behara
The premise itself isn’t bad at all. A caste-obsessed small-time politician, Thutte Narayana, is desperate for an MLA ticket and terrified that his daughter’s disappearance will tarnish his honour and derail his ambitions. To save face, he spins it into a kidnapping story. Enter four too-familiar jobless friends, Chaitanya, Abhay, Vishnu and Prasad, who spend their days drinking, playing imaginary cricket, and speaking in meme dialogues just so audiences don’t forget to laugh at them. When two of them fall for the same girl, their lazy lives collide with Narayana’s paranoia, setting off a domino of chaos.
On paper, that’s solid madcap territory. The kind of stuff that, in the hands of a comic voice with control, could turn into sharp social satire or affectionate absurdism. But Mithra Mandali suffers from the one thing a comedy can never afford, overconfidence. It’s a film that doesn’t just tell jokes, it insists you laugh at them. The score blares, the edit jumps, the lyrics scream “funny,” as if terrified that the audience won’t get it otherwise.
Take the recurring 'chillar' theme, a loud, meme-ish score that punctuates every scene with musical emojis, reminding us that these boys are useless. It’s amusing once, tiring twice, intolerable by the third time. Or the song ‘Kattanduko Janaki,’ which tries to milk parental frustration for laughs, looping gags until they die of exhaustion.
Humour, when done right, feels effortless. Here, you can see the sweat. The timing is off, the reactions are too broad and the writing is too self-aware. Even good actors like Priyadarshi seem stranded between sincerity and sketch. Rag Mayur, Vishnu Oi and Prasad Behara show energy but no direction. They’re mouthing punchlines that don’t deliver.
Niharika NM, making her debut, gives the feeling that she’s still on an Instagram reel. That exaggerated, hyper-acted TikTok performance, eyes popping, face elastic, doesn’t translate to the big screen, where her every gesture looks over-pronounced. The influencer-to-actor transition like most cases doesn’t work well here.
Satya and Vennela Kishore appear to salvage things, and for a few moments, they do. Satya’s meta “important character” has flashes of wit, especially when the film pokes fun at itself. It’s the only part where Mithra Mandali flirts with parody. Kishore, ever dependable, brings his weary charm to the chaos. But they’re like decent masala sprinkled on a dish already over-salted.
The technicals mirror the film’s tone, energetic but excessive. Editor Kodati Pavan Kalyan has fun with disclaimers and pop-text inserts, you can see his impulse to play. Siddharth SJ’s cinematography is functional, serving the slapstick mood. But RR Dhruvan’s music is the biggest offender, a relentless commentator that refuses to stop. Every emotion, every gag, every cut has its own personalised jingle. It’s like watching a film trapped inside its own reaction video.
And yet, buried inside this chaos, there’s a glimmer of a little sincerity. You sense that everyone involved wanted to make people laugh. There’s no cynicism, just misjudgement. Mithra Mandali is not a lazy film, it’s an over-excited one. It keeps tripping over its own enthusiasm. If it had trusted its story and brought more potent joke writing, it would have found a pulse.
In the end, you leave mildly amused, mostly fatigued. The film’s heart is in the right place, but its rhythm is out of tune. It’s a try-hard class clown you can’t entirely dislike, but you wish it would calm down, breathe, and let a joke land naturally.
