‘Kingdom’ Movie Review: Vijay Deverakonda, Satyadev Deliver Immersive Performances In An Often Colourless Film

The setting of Gowtam Tinnanuri’s Kingdom is something that we’re familiar with: a kingdom is wrecked, a prophecy is born, and a messiah takes shape, waiting steadily to avenge his blood. The Vijay Deverakonda film is woven around the chosen-one archetype, but Tinnanuri injects this familiar world with surprising intricacies. A story of two estranged brothers, united by their shared trauma, a story of a fraying tribe struggling to prove their identity, and a story about all the intriguing ways guilt and loneliness tear apart a person. Kingdom has all the markings of an interesting redemption story, but one that never really takes off.

Kingdom begins with a massacre at Srikakulam in the 1920s, unleashed by colonisers who have their eyes set on gold. But in the middle of this tragedy, a king dies shortly before telling the survivors about a descendant they should look out for. With Jomon T John and Girish Gangadharan’s stunning frames of the sea, sand and the bloodshed, a story of redemption is solidly registered.

The film then moves on to the early 1990s, where a smart constable Suri (Vijay Deverakonda) battles red tape in the office and indifference from his mother (Rohini) at home to navigate the loss of his missing brother. Deverakonda is a shapeshifter as Suri, who goes from innocent cop to savage beast willing to burn the world to the ground, in order to find his brother Siva (Satyadev). Their early brotherhood is covered in a beautiful Anirudh song, depicting the importance of companionship in abusive households.

Then, a spy operation begins to take shape as Suri sails to Jaffna to meet his brother and test the charged waters of the Lankan cartel. This is sort of where Kingdom backtracks from its emotional stronghold of the subject. The dwindling tribe of Srikakulam we saw in the beginning are labourers of Murugan and his family, a Tamil-speaking group that uses these tribesfolk to smuggle gold. But one is not sure about the reasoning behind the depiction of Tamils as wealthy oppressors in Jaffna, especially during the war-addled '90s — in a striking contrast to reality, where Tamil civilians were victims of the civil war.

Nevertheless, Murugan (Venkitesh) makes for a menacing villain, even if his arc is overwhelmingly one-note and devoid of any detail. Murugan is the ruler of Divi Island, populated by refugees. Women, for instance, cannot step out of Divi, formulated to stop the men of the island from ever dreaming of hatching an escape plan. Tinnanuri writes some solid scenes surrounding these ideas, one including a woman who steps out of the island to finally see her son in the NICU. This might be a purely “mass” evoking moment, but it is also written to draw parallels between one mother reuniting with her son, with another mother’s grief: Siva’s mother, who never gets to see her firstborn. But these scenes don’t get the space to brew or develop. For instance, Siva and Suri’s mother is nowhere to be seen after the beginning. Bhagyashrii Borse, too, is stuck in a role that deserved much more screen time and depth.

Siva makes for a fascinating character. While we see glimpses of Suri’s loneliness, we are never allowed into his brother’s mind palace — this complements his enigma quite a bit, and Satyadev does a fantastic job. But his loyalty to this community, which is established when we first meet him, needed much better embellishment in its writing. This is sort of the issue with much of Kingdom. Individually, the scenes are written mindfully, and metaphors come alive — one with the boat, alluding to Noah's Ark, is particularly powerful — but there isn’t enough going on in the writing of the film and the development of its characters as a whole to bring these moments together. With the story of another brother looming in the shadows, the hope is for the film to find its redemption soon.