Aneethi Movie Review: Arjun Das, Dushara Vijayan Deliver Powerful Probing Melodrama On Inequality

About Aneethi Movie Review: Arjun Das, Dushara Vijayan Deliver Powerful Probing Melodrama On Inequality Movie

Looking forward to watching Arjun Das and Dushara Vijayan’s Aneethi? Read our review first to learn more about this gripping tale.

The silently seething protagonist, embodying all the social injustice that we turn a blind eye to every day, says at the end of the ultra-violent climax, “If someone folds his hands in front of you to ask for forgiveness, you would be a beast not to forgive.”

Thiru is a food-delivery boy for a company called Monkey Meal. He aces taunts insults and abuse from customers on a regular basis. Thiru wants them all dead.

“I have an urge to kill everybody,” he confesses to his therapist who is more amused than alarmed. We can see what the therapist can’t. Theru is ticking timebomb waiting to become an urban killing machine.

The initial scenes of growing fondness between Thiru and Subbu are deceptively gentle. A beautifully painted hand emerges from a little box in the fortress-like gate to accept the food boxes. Thiru first falls in love with the hand. The courtship is like chapters borrowed from a Mani Ratnam film.

And then, the violence sets in. To reveal the rest of the plot would not be correct. Suffice it to say that the savage violence, crime, murder, betrayal and the vengeful bloodbath that follows the romantic preamble is unexpected, but disturbingly just. When Thiru goes on a rampage against those who have wronged him the audience is given no space for mourning the loss of innocence. These people had it coming.

Social inequality grows at an alarming rate all around us. We have conveniently blinded ourselves to its ruinous ramifications. This film serves up a timely if somewhat exacerbated warning.

Many of the supporting characters in this ‘upstairs-downstairs’ take on societal insensitivity could be from Bing Joon Ho’s unforgettable but flawed South Korean film Parasite. The rich in both come across as grotesque caricatures who in some twisted way, deserve the end that they meet.

“For the rich servants are equal to thieves,” Thiru tells Subbu after their love is waylaid by the savage cruelty of fate. There is no happy ending here.Just a litter of shattered of hopes. The film ends with the fatally wounded hero cycling into a vast stretch of farmland with his dead father. It is a deeply ironic ending suggesting a utopian closure to a life that has never known any joy.

In spite of its tonal excesses, and some terribly over-heated performances by the supporting cast, Aneethi is a film that must be seen. It is about a crime we commit every single day. When have we really treated our house help as equals? Calling them a part of your family and giving them extra money to calm your conscience just won’t do. Vidya Balan discovered this recently in Jalsa. In Aneethi the rich-poor divide gets deeper, darker and more sanguinary.

Aneethi (Tamil, Streaming On Prime Video)

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