Ghaati Review | Jejamma Meets Sheelavathi In This New Anushka Shetty Starrer

Few faces are as defiant as Anushka Shetty’s—in particular, her revenge face. There are several such moments in her new film Ghaati, recently released on Amazon Prime, where this is almost boastfully shown. In one scene, she breaks a wine bottle on villain number one’s head and kills him by thrusting the bottle into his neck. In another, she simply stares back at a man who has come to kill her and he screams and runs away in fear. But the best scene is watching her grab villain number two by his hair and dunk him in a tub of black liquid to stop him from throwing tantrums. It’s something we might have seen new mothers do. It’s what is most entertaining about Ghaati—that despite Shetty’s power-packed revenge-hungry face, the body has zero enthusiasm to kill boy-toy villains. It is perhaps the first time in Indian cinema that we are watching a heroine slay the bad guys not ferociously. but lazily.

Ghaati is set in a part-mystical part-real world located in the Eastern Ghats, at the border of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. Its people, the Ghaatis, are a tribal farming community controlled by the powerful Naidu brothers, who force them to grow and trade cannabis. They are forbidden from growing any crops, as also from taking up any other kind of occupation. A special kind of first grade cannabis called the ‘Sheelavathi’ strain is what the region is known for. Shetty’s name in the film too is ‘Sheelavathi’, because she was born out of it and it seems to have given her superhuman strength.

But if you too have been a longtime fan of Anushka Jejamma Shetty’s sword-wielding skills from her hit film Arundhati (2009), then you might want to believe that her superhuman strength isn’t only coming from Sheelavathi, it is coming from Jejamma. This is the only way in which Ghaati itself becomes an interesting homage to Arundhati. Some might say we need to move on from 2009 and allow heroines to break away to become other things, better things. But when a woman is so able to be in conversation with herself, with a role she played 16 years ago, we must probably shut up and watch.

In Ghaati, she is a fighter but also a lover. Together with Desi Raju, her man (played by Vikram Prabhu), they are the protectors of the Ghaatis. Sheelavathi in love is the same woman as Sheelavathi in war. We see her riding a bike, singing love songs, dreaming of the day she can be married to him, serenading him, her feet dangling out of the car as she romances him inside —Telugu women in love are a treat to watch.

When it appears that the Ghaatis are slowly revolting, the Naidu brothers kill Desi Raju. The film might have us believe that his death causes Sheelavathi to become the rebel she becomes. The film will also have us believe that some heroines require the total annihilation of the hero to emerge free. This may be true; but it is also true that some heroines are able to do this with or without the hero to begin with. Shetty’s Sheelavathi is the latter.

There isn’t much else to look forward to in the film, except Shetty’s gritty yet lethargic way of massacring villains, who are themselves quite comical. Villain number two, Kundhul Naidu (Chaitanya Rao Madadi) screams when he is angry, fighting or upset. Unfortunately for him, because he is the villain, it’s all he ever gets to do in the film. Occasionally, his screams are met with hilarious responses. After one such lung-collapsing, heroic scream, Desi Raju screams back “Yenti?!” (What?!)—also something we might have seen fathers do to pacify tantrum-throwing toddlers. The other variety of villainy in this film is the softie villain. They are the fair, English-speaking, white wine-drinking people who will occasionally come on screen and say intellectually stimulating things like “Collaboration is the new innovation”. That they conduct business in this manner while villain number two is still recovering from being dunked in a tub full of black liquid, sitting alone by the pool, sticking his tongue out, is somewhat amusing.

Even if the film is barely able to stand on a weak story and clownish villains, it is still applause-worthy that it is able to do this solely and single-handedly on Shetty’s smoldering shoulders.