The Great Indian Suicide Review: The Telugu film stars Ram Karthik as Hemant, Hebah Patel as Chaitra along with VK Naresh, Pavitra Lokesh, Jaya Prakash, and others. The story is written and directed by Viplove Koneti. The music is by Sricharan Pakala. The runtime is 150 minutes.
The Great Indian Suicide Trailer
The Great Indian Suicide Movie: Plot Summary
The Great Indian Suicide movie begins with a car setting on fire and someone inside dying due to the same. The story then shifts to Hemanth, a cafe owner mesmerised by a girl named Chaitra, who gets his attention with delicious cookies. The duo becomes friends and eventually falls in love. However, the movie suddenly takes a dark turn when Chaitra tells Hemanth that she and her entire family are soon going to die of suicide. The family plans to commit mass suicide as it will bring back her elder uncle, the man who died in the car at the beginning.
Hemanth is baffled to hear all this and decides to find the truth. He marries Chaitra, starts living with her family, and tells them he also wants to die with them. Hemanth starts to notice bizarre things inside the house as he tries to dig for the truth. Is it some mental illness, or do superstitions blind the family? How did it start, and what will happen to the family and Hemanth? We get our answers in the end.
The Great Indian Suicide Review: Discussion
When the movie mentioned it is based on true events, I immediately thought of the Burari Deaths of 2018, where the Chundawat Family of Delhi did a mass suicide ritual to bring back the patriarch of the family. Everyone in the family died. However, the makers have not specified what true incidents inspired them.
The 150-minute-long movie makes everything look like a joke. Hemanth looks like a fool who thinks he’s being smart by trying to find the truth. Chaitra looks creepy from the beginning itself, with her friendly behaviour and reactions to Hemanth’s proposal and everything else. It’s just laughable how Hemanth marries Chaitra without even her noticing, and she’s just okay. But I let it slide as it’s a movie, and some scenes will be dramatised, even if they look hellish stupid.
The second half is unbearable to watch, as the story makes no progress. It is already established that superstitions blind Chaitra and her family. Hemanth’s attempts to find the family secrets take too much time amidst the sluggish narrative. While the story refuses to progress, the makers make it worse with awkward and badly executed romantic scenes between Hemanth and Chaitra. Apart from the first 30 minutes, the movie lacks sincerity in telling us why the entire family wants to kill itself and how strong the intention is!
MAJOR SPOILER ALERT
The second half was already unbearable, but the revelation of the entire suicide mission left me very frustrated. We learn that Chaitra is the mastermind of everything. The uncle who died had sexually abused her when she was a child. So, she meets a Baba who helps her get over the trauma. Together, they come up with a plan to kill the entire family (through suicide), who was aware of what was happening to her but did nothing. Before killing them, she wanted to take their entire property.
I am okay with the idea of someone wanting to avenge whatever wrong was done to them. But The Great Indian Suicide takes such a cheap route to tell us the story. Chaitra uses her sex appeal to lure men. The Baba also sleeps around with young girls. Chaitra is aware of this, but her character is shown too dumb to understand that he’s also a creep. The Baba and Chaitra use drugs to control other people’s minds. The scenes between Baba and Chaitra are shot in a sexual way, although they never sleep with each other.
Chaitra’s sister tries to seduce Hemanth often, but the climax revelation about her also makes everything we saw before more disturbing. The scenes where the family performs rituals are shot poorly. Due to the male gaze in the storytelling, Chaitra and her sister are shown as objects of desire.
During the climax, Hemanth confronts Chaitra in front of the entire family. A man who kissed Chaitra without consent was lecturing about consent! He became the hero and saviour, while the woman became a wrongdoer (that’s exactly what the intention was). Chaitra is shown as this maniac who will stoop to any level to get what she wants. The treatment given to her character and the topic of child sexual abuse are infuriating and nauseating.
By making Chaitra the bad guy, which was predictable, but the reason wasn’t, the makers shift the entire focus from how awful her uncle was to how crazy she is to manipulate her entire family. The last 30 minutes were extremely triggering.
The Great Indian Suicide Review: Final Thoughts
Overall, The Great Indian Suicide is a terrible representation of child sexual abuse, with a superstition angle used to dramatise such a grave crime. In a story about women being the victims of sexual abuse, they are reduced to using their sexuality for revenge, taking wrong and questionable steps, and being made to look like the bad guys. It is okay to tweak real stories due to creative liberty. But is not right to trivialise such crimes against women by making them only look like nasty people.
I dont think the movie trivialises the crimes against women. It rather emphasises the abuse committed against children as can be understood from the dialogue between the protagonist and the psychiartist in the final scenes. It is just the story of a girl who wanted to go to any extent for her revenge, a theme similar to the movie ‘Virupaksha’. Hemanth regrets kissing Chaitra instantly and it is not the same thing as Naresh abusing her.