What is perhaps worthy of comment is the film’s politics—much of the film concerns Satyabhama’s dealings with a Muslim family. Here too, the film is more committed to confounding, rather than to a political position— it plays with your knowledge and perception of several Islamophobic tropes without always necessarily succumbing to them. We do, however, get a “mass” action scene in the “sensitive” area of Hyderabad Old City, as well as a couple of other stereotypes thrown in. It’s almost as if the film wants to be a Dirty Harry-esque cop film, but keeps having compunctions about the excesses and trigger-happiness of that type of film. Perhaps nothing surfaces these compunctions quite like its ending.
Satyabhama is another film that reveals Telugu filmmakers’ desire to make slicker, cleverer films – but their inability to make these films work with their writing neutralises the potency of their ambitions. This is something the film shares with the HIT franchise—there are a lot of clever beats here, but no real substance. It feels like the characters are written to be imitations of archetypes from other films—this is fine if we’re watching pulp, but that’s not what these films are going for. When characters in these films tell us that their actions are motivated by something that happened to them, we accept it like we accept a law of trigonometry, not because we feel the truth of this drive.
But this is by no means a bad film. Kajal Aggarwal has for the longest time been saddled with roles that didn’t give her what she deserved. This is a film in which she shows that she’s a bonafide star who deserves to lead films. As a step in this direction, Satyabhama is serviceable.
