As the world descends into bloody tribalism, so too do the movies. The title of Srikanth Odela's wackadoodle Telugu hit The Paradise is presumably ironic: much of its action takes place in a muddy, storm-lashed 1980s migrant camp populated by a tribe yet to be officially recognised by local and state government. Barefooted, starving, increasingly desperate, often seen cradling the bodies of their slain and fallen comrades, the Savari people are easy prey for local gangsters, who've seized upon these wanderers as a source of cheap, disposable labour, and used their women for sexual kicks. They are a people calling out for a hero, above all else, and he eventually arrives in an unlikely, feminised form. His name is Jadal, and he's first brought into this world after those same heavies attach a jeep's jumpleads to the belly of his pregnant mother in a bid to abort her lovechild. (Don't worry: we'll be circling back to this.) Jadal is one of two, actually: his twin sister doesn't survive this callousness, a loss Jadal's mother commemorates by routinely braiding the lad's flowing locks into twin, schoolgirly ponytails. He grows up to be local megastar Nani - whose name, certainly, has an apt ring - and an uncommonly huffy freedom fighter closely associated with the crows who persist in this area, largely by finding sustenance at a nearby rubbish dump. He's like a bird, see! He'll peck your eyes out as soon as look at you! His unlimited supply of childhood trauma - beloved dog tossed into a well! Relentless, savage beatings! Learning his mother sold her body, and running his own flesh across the camp's barbed wire in solidarity! - only fuels his push for recognition and restitution! He's doing it for his people! For the girls! For his own, dear mamma! Given the frenzied limb-lopping and hand-hammering that follows, however, we might usefully wonder how many mothers and daughters will still be left watching The Paradise by the time a second pregnant belly is offered up before us as a potential site of violence.
On one level, Odela's film is what has become profitable business as usual for the Telugu cinema: beardy men punching one another to a variably bloody pulp. It's 40% outlandish inspiration, 60% Monster energy drink, which has apparently become to this industry what cocaine was to 1970s Hollywood: the fuel that first allows directors to stay up all night thinking up new and extreme things to do with their region's superstars, and later endows them - on set and in post-production - with the blokey confidence to crank everything we see up by a factor of eleventy thousand. Certainly, this will be the loudest film your eardrums will have to endure in 2026: it is, at base, one long, giant roar of boysiness, testosterone to the max. (Anirudh Ravichander's score combines pummelling drums with endless hollers and insistent nu-metal guitar.) Some of this is pure front: a thick toplayer of baroque style, intending to conceal the fact the film's narrative basics are those of a mid-Nineties Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude van Damme vehicle. But its stronger sequences do have style and verve, and I suspect one reason for The Paradise's success is that some filmbros feel they're watching an emergent director attempting intriguing things within the limitations of the generic hero movie. If the hero is styled like a girl - as if to suggest he absorbed his late sister's spirit (?) - then our heroine (Kayadu Lohar) is explicitly characterised as "like a son", pragmatically turning out softcore so as to pay off her late father's debts. Amid the tumult, Odela lands on some great, striking images: a room crammed full of lawyers, pressganged into finding reasons to throw the book at our heroes; migrants ganging up in crow formation against the cops sent in to break up their camp. In 2026, there's also something pointed about a Telugu film centred on oppressed minorities where the villains (to a man) speak Hindi, identified here as the voice of the oppressor. Some folks, we gather, have to shout louder just to be heard. Still, it's a fine line between making an impressive noise - announcing yourself, as Odela has with his first two features - and going completely and irreversibly over the top. The most scathing review of The Paradise may be the one offered by the young woman who walked out of my matinee screening the minute those jump leads were attached to that belly, trailing an identifiable air of "oh, so this is one of those movies"; it may also be the ultimate judgement on the feminist credentials this plot strains so hard to wave in our faces.
There were, I must confess, places where I felt tempted to walk away myself, where the element of Monster in this film spills over and into your eyes, nose and throat. (C'mon fella, Odela seems to say: lap it up.) An early fight scene in a refectory sees Jadal eviscerate one taunting foe's face with an assist from a wall-mounted fan; he punches another so forcefully in the throat that the impact looses a CG molar. (Odela likes this effect so much he repeats it a few moments later.) The scene has one good visual idea: setting the camera to sway for a few beats with a concussed ne'er-do-well while the carnage unfolds either side of him. Yet the reason this sequence grabs us so is that, for much of The Paradise, we're in the exact same position as Mr. Wobbly: being boxed around the ears by a show-off filmmaker who's weaponising his ingenuity. (There's an echo of it in a later scene which finds Jadal sawing some unfortunate's head off and kicking the resultant barrel of blood into a baying crowd: this time, we're the crowd.) However much this script gestures towards saying something interesting about lineage and masculinity, the filmmaking is trapped in much the same vicious cycles as we've seen elsewhere in India's current sociopathic new wave. Just as Dhurandhar was gnarlier and snarlier than 2023's Animal, and Dhurandhar 2 was gnarlier and snarlier than that, The Paradise is trying - comically so, in places - to top all previous headsmashers; these filmmakers aren't really talking to us or to wider society, they're egging one another on to come up with ever more lurid and leering fantasies. The exploitation described within this narrative is as nothing compared to the exploitative film itself: Odela has an eye and clear talent, but his judgement isn't fully formed, and isn't always what it should be. After dodging one last thrust in our direction - a closing credit that insists what we've just been watching was "A Srikanth Odela Cinema" (no, Srikanth! That's not how words work!) - we leave The Paradise with a sense of having seen a movie movie, yes, but also the pounding headache, ringing ears and long list of regrets and reservations that typically accompany the experience of being subjected to something suboptimal. It really is too much: I do think Indian cinema would be in a far healthier place right now if its young male directors could step away from the Internet and their Game of Thrones boxsets and put the Monster back in the closet.
The Paradise is now showing in selected cinemas.
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