‘Vaathi’ movie review: Dhanush can’t save this middling education drama that kills its own potential
Director Venky Atluri’s film begins with an intriguing premise, but an uneven screenplay and a terribly misspent Dhanush contribute to its undoing
(Originally published in The Hindu on February 17, 2023)
Minutes into Venky Atluri’s Vaathi (or SIR in Telugu), you notice a pattern, the shadow of which travels throughout the film. Venky begins the story in a nonchalant, sobering fashion. In 2022, three boys discover a box of video cassettes. They play the video and we see the back of a teacher writing some trigonometry sums on a blackboard. It’s Dhanush (of course) and he even turns towards the camera for a brief half-second. The coveted mass introduction shot goes poof. Does half a second count? The mystery of the cassettes takes the boys to a District Collector’s office, and Venky once again shows Dhanush, looking straight at us from a picture on the wall.
If the intro is so sobering and intriguing, Venky’s casual use of songs in the first half also carries this subdued energy, and the prospect of an entire film in the same mould excites. The fine dancer in Dhanush takes a step back when there is no set-up for the first song; he walks down a street and shakes a leg casually with no notice. And in the middle of Vaa Vaathi, a romantic track, Venky tells something heavy, of how a school becomes a temple for the marginalised communities who are not allowed inside temples. These are fantastic ideas.
But this is only half of the pattern; unfortunately, Vaathi is full of one-off ideas that immediately find their evil twin.
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