Premada Oorali Review: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Premada Oorali starts as a warm family comedy and has a decent father-and-son story at its core. But loud writing, soap opera-style filmmaking, and regressive ideas about women make it a hard film to recommend.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5)
Language: Kannada
Genre: Family Drama
Director: Manoj Kumar
Cast: Rangayana Raghu, Shreeraam, Thapaswini Poonacha, Ramika Shivu
Every so often, a small film becomes a giant hit that nobody saw coming. Premada Oorali is one of those. The Kannada rural drama has turned into one of the biggest success stories of the year for the industry, and it is easy to see why people are showing up. It offers a familiar, comforting story at a time when many viewers are tired of loud action films. The harder question is what that comfort is built on.
The story centers on a widowed father named Naganna, played by Rangayana Raghu, who runs a farm in rural Karnataka with his son, played by Shreeraam. Naganna wants an educated daughter-in-law to complete the family.
The film begins like a feel-good comedy of errors, which feels like a nice break from heavy cinema. Before long, though, it settles into a loud, grating tone that is hard to ignore, both in the writing and in the way scenes are put together.
To be fair, there is a half-decent story hiding in here. Naganna carries guilt and anger over mistakes from his past, and he badly wants his motherless son to grow up to be a more patient man than he was. He gives the boy love and teaches him honesty so that even hard conversations between them feel easy.
“My son shouldn’t be like me,” he tells himself, and the audience is slowly shown his dark history. The trouble is that this thread never gets the strong payoff you expect.
The family also includes Vasantha, played by Ramika Shivu, a niece who is almost a daughter to them. The film leans on the old frenemy-turned-lover idea, and the subtitles make it painfully clear that she is a “tomboy,” so you can guess a makeover scene is coming.
Then the central conflict arrives. The son is torn between his love, Rukmini, played by Thapaswini Poonacha, and his father’s push to settle down, and a predictable love triangle takes over.
Here is the real issue. The problem is not that the film uses old tropes, since many Indian films do. The problem is the writing, which seems to believe it is modern and forward-thinking about marriage, love, and relationships before marriage, when its ideas are actually deeply troubling.
As angry, foolish men judge women for choosing how to live their own lives, the film slowly joins in, and it leaves you feeling uneasy. It pours sweet sentiment over old-fashioned ideas about marriage and purity, and then sets it all to a stream of syrupy songs.
Once you notice this, something else becomes clear. The whole film is shot like a series of loud television soap episodes. The editing is choppy, the dialogue is wildly dramatic, and many scenes seem built to go viral as short vertical videos, perhaps for viewers who get their views from preachy forwarded messages. That may explain some of the film’s reach, but it does not make for good cinema.
Credit is due for the fact that the film is clearly connecting with a large audience, and Rangayana Raghu gives the father some warmth. But popularity does not erase the damage done when a story presents controlling attitudes toward women as sweet, normal family values.
If you are looking for something with a stronger sense of purpose this weekend, our review of Reporting Live looks at Parineeti Chopra’s newsroom drama, which has a better message even if it lacks tension. For something spookier, our review of Haunted Hotel Season 2 covers Netflix’s funny, darker animated season, and our review of Other Mommy shows what happens when a horror idea misfires.
Premada Oorali is now playing in theatres.