Suchin Mehrotra

A group of wide-eyed, middle-aged men stare at a collection of TV screens, periodically erupting with joyful screams and frantic hugs of celebration. The scene is intentionally framed like a group of male friends watching a cricket match that their team is winning. Except what’s unfolding on those screens is the live coverage of the 26/11 terror attacks, as innocent people are gunned down. The cheering men are a group of top Pakistani officials, ISI top brass, gangsters, arms dealers and businessmen. One of them is even on the phone to one of the terrorists, gleefully barking instructions about which hostages to kill next.

Maddock Films’ “Stree-verse” is arguably the most enjoyable franchise kicking around Hindi cinema these days. Though that’s not saying much. The promising horror-comedy universe—made up of Stree, Stree 2, Bhediya, and Munjya— enters its fifth instalment with Thamma, from Munjya director Aditya Sarpotdar back at the helm. This time, it’s vampires.

It seems poetic somehow that Kantara A Legend: Chapter 1 releases in the same month as the 10-year anniversary re-release of Baahubali. Rarely since S.S. Rajamouli’s landscape-defining two-part epic have I felt this level of “how-did-they-pull-that-off” admiration at the absolute conviction, stunning execution, and thunderous scale of an Indian film. Kantara A Legend: Chapter 1—writer-director-star Rishab Shetty’s prequel to his 2022 film, which took the nation by storm,—has all the features of a typical “sequel”. It’s bigger, flashier, more scattered, and less potent. But strictly as a feat of filmmaking and painstaking craft, it’s a thing to marvel at.