Vijay Kanakamedala’s “Bhairavam” (2025) goes right into the pantheon of instantly disposable remakes nobody ever asked for. A spin on the 2024 Tamil film “Garudan,” it’s so busy pandering to the beats of a traditional masala film that it is left with no voice of its own.
It’s borrowed and rehashed, lacking a firm spine. Derivativeness can work when the film is also in on the joke. But the makers are so oblivious that it gets grating to endure this mess.
Circling three men: Gajapathi, Varadha, and Seenu film initially gloats over their friendship seemingly surpassing individual, varying socioeconomic status. But soon, it gains centrality and casts the friendship into disarray. The façade shatters. Bitterness emerges, cloaking the group in distrust.
It’s a tale of friendships, slowly growing resentments and misgivings giving way to terrible spite and rivalries. How do equations stay the same, unabated, untempered by vicissitudes of realisations? A mythological bent tends to position Gajapathi and Varadha as Laxman and Ram, and Seenu as Hanuman, who defend them against any rising crisis.
It’s Seenu’s eventual transformation that sets off the plot. Compounding this is also friction within the larger village ecosystem, power differentials fomenting a stew of suspicion and antagonism.
Daggers are drawn. Any surface of pure intentions is undercut by the ignoble and brutally selfish. In case the mood doesn’t darken too much, the makers throw in a clutch of songs with replaceable female faces, each of which is eminently forgettable.
The lead trio ham a lot and try to be funny, but the film’s writing deflates their efforts with an unrelenting steadfastness. The script is too complacent, tropey, flattening any specificity that could be memorable. What we are left with is a blur. Questions of loyalty and backstabbing burst forth, but they don’t vibrate with the intended pain and heartburn.
Characters in the film go through this gamut, jolted from apparent peace to widening chasms. Frays start affecting the fabric of the friendship, as one individual works himself up over his being a constant target of condescension.
It’s a wake-up call to the others, so they do take him seriously and not the same old dismissive slant. But the indistinct, sloppy writing doesn’t let any character grow into their own. Instead, it pigeonholes them into simple, black-and-white attributes. There’s no shading or finer delineations of conflicts. This cut-and-dried treatment does the film no favours, turning it into a lazy, stodgy mess.
Naturally, women have no agency or have been given any thought in this narrative. They show up simply as eye candy, flaunt a slew of dance moves, and promptly disappear when matters turn grim.
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Deepening rifts ought to have the edge of unease, hurt, and anguish. The film hints at those, but with a tepid dash. It’s mild, lax, and barely insistent on the undercurrents that have already been seething for a while. When the breaking away does happen, the pangs don’t quite slice. It feels cursory, merely called on as a plot point rather than a smoothly flowing narrative decision.
Where’s the ache that feels visceral, the hurt that stings? The emotional vacuity beneath the major plot drags the film into a muddle. A human, impassioned edge gets buried under a tiringly recycled remake, where originality and spark are nowhere to be found.
Is it too much to expect a remake to have at least some self-awareness, playfulness that can make the whole thing less of a slog? But the makers remain cruel, tossing his characters through the motions of betrayals and returns without a whiff of palpable, sincere emotion.
How do the dynamics shift once a supposed friend shifts away? How does it affect the residual group’s existing power dynamics? Does it rake up new, unexpected conflict? Stakes are missing, even as Kanakamedala cranks up the decibel level and sheer hysteria on display. The action escalates to fruitless ends. “Bhairavam” reeks of a certain lackadaisical energy that directors bring to films and expect blind compliance from the audience.
It’s almost arrogant, and this is nothing new. A solid remake also illuminates the original, extends the conversation within the ambit of faithfulness. There should be some special dimension that advances ideas of the primary narrative and brings in rich, fresh angles.
Scaling up the pitch and priming key points of transition demands a fairly seasoned hand at landing a tonal achievement. “Bhairavam” strains to maximise its appeal but ends up criminally under-served by its shameless regurgitation of remake templates.
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