This film though-at whose centre there’s a political assassination-is steadfast in its refusal to sink too deep or dwell too long in existential complexities. I might have been interested to learn how he deals with the repetitive pain of killing himself, or perhaps just the sheer difficulty of doing it to himself-but I suppose that might have resulted in a different type of film. Where a protagonist’s heroism gets accentuated by his survival against the odds, we get one whose heroism is defined by his willingness, and why, even his enthusiasm, to die. For instance, where we are used to a villain fuming over the survival of a hero, we get one, Dhanushkodi (SJ Suryah), vexed by the death of the hero. It results in some wonderful subversion of commercial cinema tropes. Khaaliq, a Muslim by birth, is said to have been born in a Hindu temple, and it’s intriguing that this Muslim should be the victim-or beneficiary, depending on your point of view-of the Hindu idea of reincarnation. After a while, the death of Khaaliq himself becomes a dark joke, and it’s fascinating to experience a story in which the protagonist, a bonafide star, gets killed over and over again. The characters are the same, and yet, the cause-effect interplay creates new delicious situations, and associated problems, each time. And yet, Venkat Prabhu manages to tie all these iterations and their events into a clever mystery that must be solved by Khaaliq, one step at a time. Every time Khaaliq dies and gets reborn, the story explores a new idea. Venkat Prabhu reposes his faith squarely in the joys emergent from the time-loop idea and brings out an ace each time.
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![casting of super kannada movie casting of super kannada movie](https://up.picr.de/34474811yj.jpeg)
And yet, Maanaadu has two stars-TR Silambarasan and SJ Suryah-and no duets, love stories, punch dialogues, or why, even fight sequences that threaten your suspension of disbelief. Every time a Tamil film adopts a seemingly Western idea, I fear that we might fail to capitalise on the inherent advantages of the idea, potentially diluting the entertainment in search of ‘commercial compromises’. And boy, does it have fun with this time-loop idea.