Ilanti Cinema Meereppudu Chusundaru review: Yes, you never watched a film like this

Ilanti Cinema Meereppudu Chusundaru review:

Cinema has a strange way of reminding us of its own elasticity. Just when you think you’ve seen every trick the medium can play, a film comes along and pulls the rug from under your assumptions. Ilanti Cinema Meereppudu Chusundaru is one such unruly nauseating beast. To call it a film feels both accurate and misleading, it’s closer to a dare, a stubborn declaration that cinema is whatever one mad artist wants it to be and I respect that!

Writer-director: Super Raja

Cast: Super Raja, Vamshi Gonee, Deepthi Srirangam, Ramya Priya

Super Raja, the film’s writer-director-actor-publicist, spent two years dragging this eccentric vision from idea to release. He promoted it on the streets, built a reputation on the Telugu internet, and finally, against all odds, convinced Mythri to give it a limited theatrical run. That, in itself, is a miracle. The film’s existence is a story of hustle and audacity, even if what’s on screen often feels like an assault on the senses.

The experiment is clear, a 100-minute single shot, no cuts, no reprieve, no safety nets. Raja and his friend (Vamshi Gonee) ride a bike across Hyderabad on a desperate errand to stop Raja’s ex, Sai Pallavi, from boarding a flight to Germany. That’s the skeletal plot. On this skeletal frame, Raja drapes layer after layer of sound, commentary, digression, hallucination. It’s less a journey to the airport than a journey into the cluttered attic of his mind.

Now, single takes are not new. From Before Sunrise to Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam, filmmakers have used the form to conjure intimacy, urgency, sometimes sheer bravado. But Ilanti Cinema… is not about intimacy or urgency, it is about excess. The film opens with Raja directly addressing us, announcing that this is a middle-class boy’s attempt to break into stardom, to please Kalamma Thalli (Goddess of Arts), and to rewrite Telugu cinema’s rules. From then on, the ride becomes a barrage, 1400 dialogues, 10,000 expressions (his words, not mine), flashbacks, inner monologues, drugged-out distortions, divine interventions, and arguments that keep tripping over themselves. 

The sound design, handled by the excellent Ganesh Gangadharan, makes it clear this chaos is intentional. Five parallel audio tracks run, the bike conversation, Pallavi voice flashbacks, Raja’s debates with the goddess, his heads up for audiences and his stoned mental detours. The result is a sonic thunderstorm, screams, wheezes, sudden music bursts, non-sequiturs. Watching the film often feels like accidentally stumbling into a Twitter Space where everyone is unmuted and desperate to be heard.

Does it work? That depends on what “work” means to you. As narrative cinema, it’s unbearable. The emotional stakes, the lost love, the desperate chase, never land because they’re drowned in noise. People walked out mid-show, patting the shoulders of those who remained and muttering “All the best,” as though surviving the film was a trial by fire.

And yet, as an experiment, it commands a strange respect. Like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room or Ed Wood’s idiosyncratic memorable disasters, this is cinema so personal, so divorced from convention, that it creates its own category — The Super Raja cinema. Raja’s voice is eccentric to the point of alienation, but it is a voice, nonetheless. There’s no pandering to market, no attempt to smooth out the rough edges, heck at one point in the climax, the friend character shoos away people who disturb the frame. The actor wanted a 100-minute single shot of mania, and that is exactly what he delivers.

This is why the film is difficult to dismiss outright. Beneath the migraine it induces, there’s a kind of maddening purity. Raja doesn’t make this to be liked. He makes it to exist. And in the Telugu industry that smothers experimentation under the weight of formulas, that stubbornness feels radical. It’s a reminder that cinema, even bad cinema, is a playground for obsession.

But I’ll also be honest, obsession is not the same as greatness. Watching Ilanti Cinema Meereppudu Chusundaru is like being strapped to the backseat of that bike, forced to listen to a friend who is high and won’t shut up, who keeps looping back to his heartbreak, his dreams, his cosmic destiny, until your ears bleed. It’s cinema as whiplash, and only the hardiest and most masochistic cinephiles will find joy in the bruises it leaves.

In the end, the film is both thrash and triumph. Thrash because it overwhelms and alienates. Triumph because it exists at all. Because c’mon, nobody will ever make anything like this. And the fact that today a film like this released in theatres, maybe that’s enough. Maybe the achievement here isn’t the quality or immersiveness of the film, but the fact that an independent artist like Super Raja believed in his madness so deeply that he willed it existence, that too onto the big screen. If cinema is also about leaving behind fossils of human ambition, failed, flawed, unforgettable, then Ilanti Cinema Meereppudu Chusundaru earns its place in the record.