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'Mithya' Movie Review: A Coming-Of-Rage Classic About Lost Innocence
Starring a wonderful Athish Shetty, filmmaker Sumanth Bhat's drama is about a boy in transit — not just physically but also emotionally.
Director: Sumanth Bhat
Writer: Sumanth Bhat
Cast: Athish Shetty, Prakash Thuminad, Roopa Varkady
Language: Kannada
How much does a young boy have to go through to be allowed the freedom to have an emotional breakdown? When we first meet Mithya (Athish Shetty), what we see is his back turned towards us as he travels on a train from somewhere to somewhere else. We later learn that he’s not travelling out of choice.
He’s being displaced from his home in Mumbai to Udipi in Southern Karnataka where he will live with his uncle, aunt and their two daughters. Like Mithya, the film about him too has its back turned towards us. It’s not a film that grants you the solace of having empathised with its broken protagonist. Instead, it reveals these broken pieces so sparsely that we feel as lost and helpless as he does.
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Mithya is a boy in transit, not just physically but also emotionally. This displacement means that Mithya must find his place within this new family. They are more than welcoming of him (the uncle says Mithya is the son he always wanted) and they give him room, even if it means the rest of the family has to squeeze into one tiny space. They even let Mithya borrow his cousin’s Ladybird bicycle so he can go to school like the other boys in his new hometown.
Gradually, we learn reasons for why Mithya was forced into this transit. When we’re told that his mother died by suicide after the death of his father, we get a sense that Mithya himself, along with us, is discovering the gruesome details about his parents' demise. And yet there’s no loud wailing or grand gestures of defeat. There’s a matter of factness in his eyes even in the way he accepts the details of something as brutal. Not that he has the option to let it all out given how truly isolated he feels.
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Mithya’s loss of innocence is thus of the most painful kind; it isn’t a gentle coming of age as much as it is life beating the innocence right out of him. And when a friend (his only), asks him if he’s begun to watch “those kinds of videos yet”, we realise that he’s in similar transit, even in terms of age. Not only is he in-between two cities, two families, and two homes, he’s also stuck in that tricky in-between where he’s neither a child nor yet an adult.
But it’s at this stage that we see Mithya being pushed even further into a corner. We find out about a second set of relatives who want to adopt Mithya, not because they love him, but because they find value in the assets that his father has left behind. In a painful scene, we find these relatives trying to poison the little boy with ideas about his mother. It isn’t merely his future that’s at stake when he’s forced to go through these events; it also threatens to destroy what he has left of a few happy memories.
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Yet for a film of so many tragedies, it’s the moments of joy that feel even more heartbreaking. Like the scene where Mithya is gifted with a brand-new bicycle; as the camera lingers for a second longer on him, the expression can be read in myriad ways. It could be the boy’s disbelief when a moment of pure happiness finally creeps up on him without warning. Or it could be deep distrust emanating from him when another adult offers him a present for something in return, like the cup of ice cream he was given a scene ago. Or worse, what if it's the guilt he feels for finally starting to accept another person in the place he’d reserved only for his mother?
These are heavy emotions for anyone to deal with, let alone a boy who hasn’t yet hit puberty. But even when Mithya gets you to feel and then succumb to the weight of what he’s feeling, Athish’s internalised performance doesn’t let you spot anything resembling a performance. In hindsight, you wonder what Sumanth Bhat must have said to Athish to bring this out of him.
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Eventually, the film is also as much about the time in Mithya’s life when he must choose his journey, after navigating this transit. All the grief and pain he seems to have buried deep within him, begin to find ways to leak into actions. Violence, perhaps, is the only outlet that allows him the option to silence the numbness.
Through all of this, you wish for Mithya to be able to find the love and empathy that’s all around. In a moving scene that reminded me of the swimming scene in Moonlight, we find Mithya in the sea with his uncle, in what feels like a symbolic baptism. In the climax, this symbol of baptism gets repeated again and this time, it’s up to him to look inwards to see if he has it in him to accept someone as his own or look away forever. Stuck in between, moments away from forgoing his ability to empathise once and for all, we see a glimmer of hope. And when Mithya finally chooses empathy, he’s probably too young to realise that it’s he who needed his own empathy.