Sathiya Sodhanai Movie Review: Suresh Sangaiah's 'Sathiya Sothanai' has a few mild laughs, but the satire never stings

21-07-2023
Suresh Sangaiah
The film feels like an early draft of 'Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum', the brilliant Dileesh Pothan movie that combined crime and humour and satire.
Sathiya Sodhanai Movie Review

Sathiya Sodhanai Movie Cast & Crew

Production : Super Talkies
Director : Suresh Sangaiah
Music Director : Raguraam

Oru Kidayin Karunai Manu is one of the great debut features in recent times. Suresh Sangaiah's second feature, Sathiya Sothanai, is stitched from the same cloth. Here, too, we get a rural atmosphere (Aruppukottai) and quirky characters and situations – but this time, the magic is missing. The story opens with a man being murdered for the jewellery on him. He has so many gold chains, he could open a store. A little later, a not-too-smart man named Pradeep (Premgi Amaren) – our protagonist – comes across the body, and thus begins a series of events that involve Pradeep's family, his fiancee, a bunch of corrupt and incompetent cops, an exasperated judge, a stolen walkie-talkie, and – most importantly – a feisty old woman dressed in white. The crux is this: Where are the jewels the dead man had on his person?

Sathiya Sothanai feels like an early draft of Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum, the brilliant Dileesh Pothan movie that combined crime and humour and satire. The difference is that in Sathiya Sothanai, things feel lazy, like they felt this much was enough for an "easy watch". The situations are stagey. Consider this. A lazy cop gets a call from a superior. He runs on the spot so as to sound out of breath. He says he is chasing criminals. His superior says those criminals are back at the police station. If that's your idea of humour… Some of the one-liners do work. But a setup like this needs more than just the occasional gag. It needs bite. There's a big reveal at the end and even that feels contrived, something tacked on just for an easy laugh rather than something that organically grew from the story. Maybe it's the sophomore slump. Let's see what Suresh Sangaiah does in Movie No.3!


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Baradwaj Rangan

National Award-winning film critic Baradwaj Rangan, former deputy editor of The Hindu and senior editor of Film Companion, has carved a niche for himself over the years as a powerful voice in cinema, especially the Tamil film industry, with his reviews of films. While he was pursuing his chemical engineering degree, he was fascinated with the writing and analysis of world cinema by American critics. Baradwaj completed his Master’s degree in Advertising and Public Relations through scholarship. His first review was for the Hindi film Dum, published on January 30, 2003, in the Madras Plus supplement of The Economic Times. He then started critiquing Tamil films in 2014 and did a review on the film Subramaniapuram, while also debuting as a writer in the unreleased rom-com Kadhal 2 Kalyanam. Furthermore, Baradwaj has authored two books - Conversations with Mani Ratnam, 2012, and A Journey Through Indian Cinema, 2014. In 2017, he joined Film Companion South and continued to show his prowess in critiquing for the next five years garnering a wide viewership and a fan following of his own before announcing to be a part of Galatta Media in March 2022.