'The Devil' Movie Review: Darshan's Film Is Devilishly Dated

There’s no room for subtlety in Prakash Veer’s The Devil. When a character is described as a “deadly combination of a tsunami and a tornado," we know exactly who to expect. Dhanush (played by Darshan, who is currently imprisoned) loves to call himself the Devil, but he isn’t referring to a sweet talker or a devilish mastermind. He shoots a man for clicking his photo without consent, assaults women he finds attractive and burns a petrol bunk in London, well, just because he can, why else would anyone ever indulge in arson? The horns and hooves are missing, but one gets the gist. Similarly, when his antithesis, Krishna, is written with all the kindness in the world, we get shots of the man cooking for poor children, sponsoring a teen’s education, and running a soup kitchen. Where does this leave a film like The Devil? Years back, trapped in a relic of time where the writing is primitive, and tropes are nauseatingly degrading.

Who isn’t a fan of body double films? A genre that’s as intrinsic to Indian cinema as wings are to flight, we’ve seen this play out through stories of long-lost twins, rogue fathers and sons, and lookalike Robin Hoods. The Devil begins as an homage to these films, introducing Darshan as a character on the far ends of the abominable and admirable spectrums. Veer doesn’t go into their lineage, and neither does he connect their families. All we know is Krishna (Darshan), a harmless mess owner and aspiring actor, has the misfortune of sharing his countenance with the tawdry Dhanush, who happens to be the future Chief Minister candidate in Karnataka. Mahesh Manjrekar is obviously cast as the evil leader of the state, who wants to pawn off his post to his son Dhanush, despite being familiar with his degeneracy. 

Krishna is instantly likeable—an oasis of sanity in the vast, unbearable desert that is this film. His reverence for Kannada cinema legends such as Ambareesh and his unlikely romance with Rukmini (Rachana Rai), his financier, make the journey bearable, and almost make us believe the film is going somewhere. But this is when we’re harshly reminded that the film’s desires lie not in the realistic interpersonal human drama space, but in a manipulative political action drama. 

Dhanush is quite literally the devil, and we’re told this through many accounts. The film uses his depravity to make sense of lewd depictions of sexual assault with a predatory gaze. Rachana Rai and Achyuth Kumar are in most of the film, but their characters are reduced to being mere spectators of Dhanush’s chaos. The primary mandate of Achyuth Kumar’s Nambiar, for instance, is to be outwardly flabbergasted by the clownery in front of him — much of which provides some unintentional laughs. Rai, on the other hand, is stripped of the little autonomy she was given at the start, and pushed to play a damsel in distress — scenes that are straight out of a 70s villain torture book begin to unfold.

Along the way, it’s as though the film loses interest in the path it initially laid out. Is it still the political drama it set out to be? Or a love triangle tacked on as an unfortunate afterthought? With a film like The Devil, one can never be sure.