Review of Kajal Aggarwal movie, Satyabhama has released today i.e. June 7, which has a stellar star cast Kajal Aggarwal, Naveen Chandra, Prakash Raj, Harsha Vardhan, Payal Radhakrishna, Neha Pathan.
In Satyabhama, Kajal Aggarwal plays the titular character, a fierce yet determined cop who struggles to overcome one particular setback. Even as Satyabhama is compelled to revisit a chapter from her past life while tackling a missing case, it begins to haunt her through nightmares and she struggles to ensure that her determination does not tip over to obsession. Suman Chikkala’s Satyabhama is many things at once. It’s a complex mystery-thriller, and a drama that offers many quintessential mass moments like any commercial Telugu film would do.
#Satyabhama (Telugu) {2.5/5} – Average bomma.#SatyabhamaReview #Kajal pic.twitter.com/EKFZIifPlo
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At the same time, writer Sashi Kiran Tikka and director Suman Chikkala manage to make space for dealing with themes like trauma, processing grief, and the idea of moving on.
It is the writer’s decision to keep Satyabhama so plot-driven that when the handful of action sequences arrives, they feel earned and well worth the wait. It helps that Kajal Aggarwal shows great finesse in the action scenes, maintaining a great balance of believability and larger-than-life heroism, and bringing a touch of self-awareness as Satyabhama wriggles her wrist after every time she punches someone. Special mention to music director Sricharan Pakala for creating a moody background score, particularly in a post-interval fight sequence where every musical thud seems in perfect sync with Satyabhama’s kicks and punches.
There is only one brief stretch in the first half, where Satyabhama strays a little, throwing two consecutive flashback sequences amidst a tense narrative. But as we learn later, these sequences serve a major purpose in helping us learn more about these characters and their motivations, only to debunk our learnings by the end of it all. What doesn’t work in Satyabhama is the decision to bookend the story from a third-person narrator’s perspective, giving a conventionally mythical approach to a story that is inherently intimate at its core, talking about trauma and closure.
It’s hard to talk about Satyabhama without giving away spoilers, but in the final act, the film offers brief yet impactful insight on how women and men deal with a personal loss. While Satyabhama remembers the fear she once sensed on a loved one’ face, another character remembers the pain they suffered and its cause. Sometimes, all of us carry home a different feeling even after going through a similar experience, and it’s the choices we make in those crucial times that shape our humanity. Satyabhama works largely because of its ambition to explore existential ideas like this in the garb of a conventional thriller.