Spoilers ahead
Karthik Subbaraj has always insisted that he does not make films. He makes a padam, which, to be clear, is not just a literal Tamil translation of “film”, but is a separate ontological category. It says something hazy about genre, form, formula, and Subbaraj keeps theorising and re-theorising the padam with every new film he makes. Roughly, his padams chase moments of melodramatic coincidence, full of unwieldy ideas and wild insertions of plot, sculpted in camp excess and winking indulgence, with morality always at the centre of the story, where characters will ultimately revel in moral displays of affection.
His first few films—Pizza, Jigarthanda—had a strangeness and subversion, but also an organising principle of biting intelligence. Later, with Petta (2019), Jagame Thandhiram (2021), his syrupy short film in Navarasa (2021), Mahaan (2022), and Retro (2025), Subbaraj began swooning in moral tales, tackling xenophobia, sand mining, ethnic wars, and pathological violence. Reckless, messy, turgidly long, and forcefully stylish—those long takes, those abrupt cuts, those saturated yellows—these films never achieved their stated purpose, to feel the morality, unable to rise to the provocation of their form.
Dorothy is a welcome departure from that disappointment. The form is solidly present, flipping between a flashback in colour and a present in black and white—a reversal, where usually the past is rendered in monochrome nostalgia. Long shots litter the film—and there almost seems to be a narrative point to these long shots. It is not just a vanity contest for the longest shot. (Read, Retro) Conversations are also framed with ingenious fun. As are fights.
Two friends, both whose names are derived from Karthik Subbaraj—Subbu and Karthi—meet at school. Subbu, the son of the local gangster, without a mother, protects Karthi, without a father, from school bullies. Subbu also teaches him how to be a man—how to eat, to walk, to fight back. It is an erotic education. They watch soft porn—“Malayalam padam”, subtitled as Baywatch—together and imagine a future when they, too, would be able to kiss their respective lovers, assumed to be girls. Karthi styles himself after Rajinikanth, while Subbu, after Bruce Lee.
Karthi belongs to a lower caste, and though Subbu sees this as an incidental detail, his father, who cooks with the same hand he hacks, has no compunctions about using force to keep the caste equilibrium of his village untouched. (Sananth plays the adult Subbu, while Rishikanth plays the adult Karthi—both completely sewn into their characters.)
The film opens with Karthi, remorseful, calling Subbu’s father and telling him—spoiler alert—that he has done his job and killed Subbu. This opening frame doesn’t spoil the flashback, because we are, after all, in a Subbaraj padam, and everything we thought we knew about the plot’s progression turns haywire quickly, precipitously.
As they grow up, something fundamental changes, as something often does in the treacherous path between childhood and adulthood. Instead of Karthi becoming like Subbu, absorbing his lessons on masculinity, Subbu becomes like what Karthi was—afraid of blood, easy to tears, and unbothered by ideas and ideals of masculinity. Karthi, on the other hand, becomes Subbu’s father’s protege. Subbu languishes.
When Subbu’s brother brings home a wife—a “doll” from Kerala—in the form of Dorothy (Keerthy Suresh), Subbu’s eyes and heart flutters. Is it love? Is it a feminine companionship and tenderness he has never found at home? Dorothy is never allowed to become more than an ideal—pristine perfection, whose entry and exit from the film are just as abrupt. Subbaraj has always had trouble writing women characters, because he is so adept at using them as fulcrums of his plot, they become a poignant device in the same stroke that renders them flat.
What we get, instead, a lot of is male presence. And it could be in the way Karthi treks up the theater’s seats, stepping from seat to seat, to beat up someone. It could be the way Subbu weeps at a body hanging in his house, the camera tracking him as he is going wild and unsure, his future suddenly extinguished. It could be the way Karthi and Subbu both launch at a man, bodies being dragged across fallow fields, the camera unmoving, the edit uncut. In that violent struggle, every masculine ideal of violence is crushed. If Subbaraj wants to make a stylish film where the violence, too, has to be stylised, he also does his penance, by shooting violence as flailing bodies arcing awkwardly, repeatedly at each other until one slumps in death. Because violence is both—its reality and its representation—and Ilayaraja’s intuitive score emphasises this violence, this style in scenes with just as much enthusiasm with which it recedes from the film, knowing when to state its presence, and when to step back.
And then, comes the “twist”, mid-way through the film, which unmakes their respective paths and answers the question—why would Subbu’s father hire Subbu’s best friend, Karthi, to kill him off? (spoiler ahead)
Subbaraj pulls off what can only be described as a wild swing that is as troubling as it is rewarding. Subbu desires not Dorothy, but what she represents—womanhood. It is his desire for womanhood that nudges him to take shape in his trans identity, which the film’s last hour milks. His “reveal” as a trans woman is staged like a hero(ine) introduction, all build-up, tension, and a gorgeous puncture of violence. Subbu is now Dorothy.
But because it is a Subbaraj padam, we need to see a trans woman getting kicked and beaten up by Subbu, before Subbu arcs back into his trans-hood as Dorothy—as an apology, as a penance—giving the identity itself an arc. As a trans woman, Dorothy becomes coy, and her mannerisms shift so clumsily, so egregiously, it is as though she is embodying a caricature. Here, too, the sense of something being both real and its representation is palpable—how Dorothy has imbibed what it means to be a woman from the women around her, and inhabits it as an exaggeration, as parody, as a personality, as a person, all rolled into one. It is heady and discordant and tonally threatening to undo the film—and yet, never does. Dorothy’s longing for Karthi, and Karthi’s affection for Subbu, whom he is unable to see as Dorothy, produce a thick desire that throbs under the film’s skin.
The morality in all of this can be irritating, if not irresponsible. To be trans in this film is “to test the humanity of man”—the trans idea being shuffled into purpose, a means to an end that is defined by and shaped by men. The fact that you need to rationalise the trans identity in order to rationalise the trans character in this heavy-handed and melodramatic pitch scratches against the moving sincerity of the people at the heart of it. But it is a man’s world, I suppose. To make space for yourself, you have to write yourself into its male logic. As with this world, as with Dorothy, as with Dorothy, as with the Subbaraj padam. All the world’s a stage, and all the men—mostly men—merely players.