Korean Kanakaraju Movie Review | Kairam Vaashi | THR India

Kairam Vaashi reviews Korean Kanakaraju, director Merlapaka Gandhi's Telugu horror comedy. Kairam opens on the observation that after 10 to 15 years of horror comedies he has started expecting at least one distinctive hook, and here the hook is simple: the spirit is Korean, with Seoul sounding like soul as a possible playful point of inspiration. The film gets going without wasting much time, opening with an urn of ashes travelling all the way from Korea to Penukonda. Varun Tej's Kanakaraju is the leader of a chekka bhajana troupe, a traditional folk music and dance form, accompanied throughout by Satya Akkala's Kishtappa, who owns a photo studio, and joined by Ritika Nayak's Chaitra, who works at the KIA factory in Penukonda, dreams of relocating to Korea and hopes to marry a Korean man.

Kairam finds it takes nearly 50 minutes before Kanakaraju comes into contact with the urn, and that the setups around him, the chekka bhajana troupe and the photo studio, have little bearing on the story beyond enabling a hero's introduction song and the heroine's entry. He finds the first half stretched far longer than it needed to be for very little narrative mileage, the attempts to connect plot points more functional than organic, the Korea portions spoofy, tacky and caricaturish rather than sincere or dramatically engaging, the VTV Ganesh and Bulli Raju comedy track flat, and the songs only further speed breakers on an already uneven ride. The climax, he says, feels as though pages from an entirely different film found their way into the screenplay. What does land is Satya's comedy, which Kairam credits with keeping this sinking ship afloat, while Thaman's background score, once it leans into EDM in the second half, carries what he reads as a deliberate resemblance to his work in OG. As an idea Korean Kanakaraju probably sounded interesting on paper, but there is always a bridge between an idea and its execution on screen, and this film struggles to make it across. So the THR India Bottomline is: Korean Kanakaraju, or KK, is just OK, and even that is largely thanks to Satya A"KK"ala. Korean Kanakaraju is playing in theatres near you.

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