‘Kuberaa Movie Review’: A Fantastic Dhanush Anchors Sekhar Kammula’s Intricate Human Drama

Dhanush’s physical and emotional transformation in Kuberaa will be talked about for quite some time. His turn as Deva — a fantastically apt name, as the film will progress to tell you — a charming beggar who has been cheating death ever since his birth, is sensational. He can be dressed up in tailored linen or silk, but Dhanush wants you to know that he is a beggar with no shame. You see it in the way he assertively crouches on the floor when told to sit in a room, shares his biscuits with strays, and never forgets the hand that feeds. But in this Sekhar Kammula film, Dhanush registers yet another complex transition with finesse; the kind that only money, pain and knowledge bring.  

In many ways, Kuberaa feels like an extension of Kammula’s sharp ideologies — fleeting glimpses of which we’ve seen play out in Leader’s astute politics and the bubbling angst that erupts in Love Story — strangely even if this might his only film (Dollar Dreams does cover relationships) that doesn’t have a central romance. Kuberaa feels as though it’s a film that the director has been restless to make all these years. Continuing Kammula’s legion of soft boys, Dhanush is Deva, an irrevocably loyal beggar, who lives and urges others to live with spirit. When he is allowed to earn for himself, he grabs the opportunity with both hands, too naive to realise that it’s sometimes the hand that feeds that also bites. And then there’s Kumar (Nagarjuna Akkineni), an honest former CBI officer, who is arm-twisted into becoming immoral when the justice system fails him. A treacherous oil reserve racket brings these two men unwittingly together.

Kuberaa marks Kammula’s first experience with a production and cast of this stature, but the filmmaker doesn’t let it on. The director uses the canvas of the dizzying Mumbai city to show both its ability to endlessly give and snatch. The larger story about the power politics that a commodity like oil can often bring to a country is glossed over quickly, and the director moves on to what he often does best: character studies. This is also where Kuberaa outshines dramas in its ilk, because the film uses its runtime, just over three hours, to spend on small flourishes that pay high rewards. Let’s take Deva itself, for instance. We’re shown ephemeral flashback scenes from his childhood: his mother and his unborn brother’s promise, his relationship with Uppili, a boy who saved his life from trafficking and so on. These memories, which might seem exaggerated or even overlong at first glance, turn out to be powerful foreshadows that play out with beautiful payoffs in an adult Deva’s life. 

So suddenly, his instant connection with a pregnant woman, his survival instincts (even a small air vent gets a superb payoff in the film), and his constant escape from death make sense, moving pieces of our heart. In an early scene, Deva’s friend, a beggar like him in Tirupati, likens him to an elephant. “Like the loyal elephant, he will always be in the life of a person who shows him kindness,” he says. We see sparkling depictions of this, particularly in Deva’s unlikely friendship with Sameera (Rashmika Mandanna), who starts a chain reaction of kindness by helping him during a tough time. Like the cat that relentlessly gifts its feeder with mice, Deva tags along with Sameera any chance he gets, but mindfully and with consent. Mandanna is delightful as the kind stranger, whose generosity and patience for Deva bring her more trouble, but never run out. The film’s writing takes the time to establish this platonic relationship with so much nuance. Sameera doesn’t have to know Deva much to actually know who she is, instantly reminding us of our own found families. “You’ll get everyone killed and you will survive at the end of it,” she rues at one point, sharply underlining one of the biggest elements of the film. 

Depending on who watches the film, the “immortal” Deva, so to speak, will either be a cockroach or God himself. But which one is it? Named after a lord, Kuberaa makes stunning observations on faith in passing: the film’s biggest miscreant is a believer of Lord Balaji, while a woman with a heart of gold refuses to hold belief, dumbfounded at the atrocities around her. We see hints of doubt in Deva himself when money changes his world from a tiny nook in Tirupati to a bottomless one with a million possibilities. Money, for the first time, breaks something in Deva. Dhanush is especially brilliant in these scenes, struggling to make sense of the world’s greed, while also not forgetting his roots. There’s only one song in the film, and it’s symbolically used to give a beggar a larger-than-life sendoff. Composer Devi Sri Prasad and art director Thota Tharani do a seamless job in complementing Deva’s rich emotional journey.

While Kumar’s moral dilemma is initially engaging, his portions with Neeraj Mithra (Jim Sarbh) get lost compared to Deva’s intriguing coming-of-age. The ending does suffer a bit for this very reason, as the film scrambles to tie up loose ends in the larger action drama. But in the end, Deva and his questions about humanity pierce us like daggers and leave their mark.