RIFLE RANGE BOY: Maharaja

Maharaja (2024, Tamil)
Director: Nithilan Swaminathan

If you are fed up watching the same old-time-tested formulaic Indian movies, this one is for you. The story starts as a comedy, but as it goes on, the storyline gets twisted.

Just when you think you know how the story will go, it takes a tangent and yet another. And it goes on and on until it ends with a final twister.

Maharaja, a mild-mannered barber, leads a simple life with his wife and a little daughter. Right in front of his eyes, he sees a lorry, with its driver obviously off its rails, crashing into his house, killing his wife instantaneously. His ‘daughter’ is miraculously saved by a metal dustbin.

Maharajah continues life as a widower and a doting father. One day, his house is broken into, and the metal dustbin that saved his ‘daughter’ goes missing. Maharaja makes a police report.

What happened afterwards is a series of flashbacks, parallel storytelling, police brutality, and police power abuse that all lead to good old storytelling and a satisfying end to a twisted comedic thriller, if there is such a genre.

Spoiler alert: Maybe there is no such thing as a selfish gene. A person does not feel a buzz upon seeing someone with the shared DNA wronged. The skin does not quiver when a sibling is beaten up. If not, we would not have sibling rivalry. Neither would we have incest, postpartum violence or mass suicide of families. Empathy and caring are learned experiences. We all feel for our age-old friends and buddies in a closed community without sharing common DNA. Sharing Lucy’s ancient DNA does not count as a common ancestry, as perhaps all of mankind carries it.

On a sobering note, we can see how creative some netizens can be. The main character in Maharaja, Vijay Sethupathi, in his 50th film appearance, is spotted with a bandaged left ear. As if like a fortunate stroke of serendipity (for the internet trolls, at least), on a platter, the news of Trump being shot in the ear became viral. Leave it to the ingenuity of the human mind, and the world has a picture of Vijay Sethupathi and Trump on the same poster as if promoting the film!

In case viewers are wondering about the role of the snake in this movie. Fret no more. Snakes are notoriously known for not recognising their offspring and eating their own eggs. Helpful to understand the ending. In a world that sees mothers rushing helplessly into burning buildings, we also have mothers who feed their cubs to the wolves!