On demand: "Eega"

Here's a fun idea, expertly executed. In the years before his international breakthrough with the elaborate event movies Baahubali and RRR, the Telugu filmmaker SS Rajamouli arrived at a parable - framed as a bedtime story told by a father to a restless child - which expanded on local ideas of reincarnation via nods to Kafka and The Incredible Shrinking Man. Eega is the one about the man who turned into a fly: it sees boyish pipsqueak Nani (played by the actor Nani) sprouting wings and a thousand eyes to take his revenge on Sudeep (played by the actor Sudeep), a predatory capitalist who offed our hero after developing designs on his micro-artist beloved Bindu (Samantha Ruth Prabhu). As has become commonplace in Rajamouli's cinema, the film's goodies and baddies are nothing if not starkly defined. (Bindu funds her niche artistic endeavours with some sort of charity admin job - she's both a model and a modeller of virtue.) This frees up time for cooler stuff. Instead of equivocation, we get action - like Nani, in his pre-insectoid state, repurposing a satellite dish, some tin foil and a torch to illuminate Bindu's apartment after a neighbourhood power cut. (You'll have to read his watching over her as fond rather than creepy - especially after his eyes multiply.) Rajamouli makes the character's rebirth seem a logical development: even in his human state, Nani presents as a bit of an annoyance, persistently circling the other characters. It's just he's up against a total ne'er-do-well who deserves every humiliation the second half throws at him - the type of shit to which flies are drawn.

Taking a fly for a hero carries the film into the digital realm, yet Eega makes a strong case for keeping your effects small and manageable, and having them interact with analogue elements wherever possible. Sure, these are 2012-era effects - the sequence where our hero is rebirthed reminded me of early trance promotional videos - but then there's never any danger of the rotely pixelated overload that characterised Marvel's comparable Ant-Man movies; Rajamouli has visibly thought twice before powering up his processors. He's had to think anew about storytelling, too, but that may be what happens when you write a hero who, after half an hour of screentime, can only buzz for himself. The challenge Rajamouli sets himself, accepts and aces is exactly that the flyspeck Nani faces: how to bring about the downfall of a villain without recourse to the verbal exposition that makes up 90% of feature scripts. Images are forced to take over: sinuous, Fincher-like camera loop-the-loops, first-person representation of a fly's-eye view, sometimes images of words, like the message Nani writes for Bindu in the tracks of his sweetheart's tears. (The poetry in Baahubali didn't come out of nowhere.) It's a touch setbound, lacking the abundant resources the industry would later push this director's way, but Rajamouli commits to his hokum in a manner that circumvents glib, Snakes on a Plane-style winking and only heightens the dramatic stakes. The greatest compliment you can pay Eega is that it really would make for a cracking bedtime story: 12 certificate, pint-sized identification figure waggling a defiant thorax at allcomers, unexpected pockets of emotion and suspense. Even grown-ups may hold their breath when Bindu reaches blithely for a can of Raid.

Eega is available to stream via Prime Video.