Of late a lot of films on Daddy issues have made their way into movie theatres. This Telugu language melodrama is unabashedly loud and unapologetic in its elemental emotional pitch. There are two main characters, the Good Father and the Bad Son, one so good he seems to belong to another planet, the other so bad he defines human depravity, and yet both are easily identifiable figures, even the son who is a creature of avarice, a product of a nakedly acquisitive society, willing to go to any lengths to have his way.
The question that Ramam Raghavam asks—and here is where it gets its mojo—is, how far would a son go for self-fulfillment? So you thought parricide went of out of vogue with Aurangzeb? Bad Son Raghav (Dhanraj Koranani) is ready to kill his own godlike father as he sees him as a hurdle to his ambitions.
Sadly, the shocking twist is not backed by any substantially vehement cause for ill-will. Many sons don’t like being told off by their fathers, but they don’t ask their friends to run him over in a faked road accident.
The sheer absurdity of the volume of ill-will that Raghava harbours for his upright father, Ramam (Samuthirakani), is the plot’s mainstay. It pushes the evil in the character down a bottomless dungeon to make the father figure look like a mythological character. And yet, the actors make it look real.
Samuthirakani was just as noble in his last film, Thiru—Manickam in Tamil. Here in Ramam Raghavam, he goes many steps further, portraying the father with a messianic zeal without tripping over his halo.
That the irredeemably evil son is played by a stand-up comedian, and that too with a fair amount of credibility, is a feat begging for defeat. But Dhanraj Koranami pulls it off, at times, over loudly. But this is a film not ashamed to make a noise about the point it wants to prove: that lineage is not about upbringing but karma.
Sure, the treatment of the subject is not subtle. But the film’s depiction of a father’s determination to walk the straight and narrow path, even if it costs him his life, is moving.
