Vinchu Review | Sumedh Natu’s Wicked Debut Plays With Power Assumed and Destroyed

Satires are a hard nut to crack. Their humour and wit must fit hand in glove with an undeniable political thrust. Its sociological scrutiny is a matter of considerable ambition. Yet, the work ought to pulse with a fluidity of tensions. The ease elemental to its terrain demands every sensitive beat to be precisely weighed and violence to be undercut with cheekiness. Sumedh Natu’s caustic debut short film, Vinchu (The Scorpion) relies on his comic zest. Scenes zip by, brief and furious. The jabs are inevitable, coated in a gaze that efficiently strips off anxieties around identity and power till they bristle. The grimness of an attack is deceptively draped within casualness. It feels more regular and likely than an utter aberration. India’s riven political landscape has ensured this. Streaming now on Masoom Rajwani's YouTube channel after a film festival run across 2023 and 2024, Vinchu’s perceptiveness seizes onto a misguided, performative domination. Slowly, the veil is yanked apart.

Natu shrewdly opens with a bundle of inherent contradiction. Saleel (Delzad Hiwale) blazes the film open. Hiwale instantly brings an energy that’s vast and sweeping. It’s hard not to be intrigued by this young guy who tries hard to exude swagger. Somewhere deep within, he’s quiet, doubting and wary. Saleel may assertively push his way through the world, hectoring whoever he can. Ultimately, however, he’s grasping for agency and power. Just to be himself is under siege. His queerness does make him small, fragile. A content creator, he dabbles in the propaganda wing of Vinchu Sena, a right-wing political party. The dynamics are pretty much confined to his co-workers, Shrinivas (Sujay Kulkarni) and Urjita (Urjita Wani). There’s squabbling, including on matters of food. Urjita’s cavalier homophobia (her clubbing of sweet missal and “faggoty”) has no care for Saleel. Neither does he hold back while attacking her with typical patriarchal vocabulary.

Beneath Saleel’s showboating façade lies a desperation to be accepted. He’s yet to confront his delusion. He’s too wilfully blinded to sit with his inner unrest that he’s lodged away. To break out from the bubble that is extremism demands a deep, personal reckoning. More than being ready for such an upheaval, he has to be scarred, glimpse the other side, to muster any transformation. With sly, incisive observation, Natu shows how the violence may just be arbitrary, severed from any idea behind the source. An early, light sparring between Saleel and Shrinivas over appropriate use of violence skewers hypocrisies on brazen display.

Neither has really engaged or has had much of an inkling of what they are tasked to be up against. A writer is hounded, beaten up. The frame shrinks into an Insta reel with perky music. His books are taken away for “last rites”. However, the attacker doesn’t even know why he’s outraged. He vaguely knows the party supremo has been insulted. But what are the insults?

When Shrinivas proudly mentions burning another writer’s books in the same spot, insisting he’s elevated as a member, Urjita’s quick, cutting reality check comes. Where is he really?

Given the leanness of a short film, Natu is surprisingly quite confident and fleet-footed. There’s no luxury here to go long. Rather, each provocation must swiftly make a mark. A scene is frequently overlaid with several connotations at once. Natu wants to complicate and crease how traditionally queer identity is envisaged and slotted. He’s eager to problematise it, mire it in a more unappealing, unflattering light, while smartly alluding to how the vitiation may have happened. It calls for a canny mind to situate the distressed lines within what they’ve isolated themselves, the unexplored ground.

Neither does it take much for the party members to turn on each other. It’s not so much a collective vision pulling the agents together, as it is a falsely assumed gift of power. It’s an illusion, waiting only to be shattered. Infighting and fissures are a constant threat tearing in, fleetingly subsiding for a mission’s conviction. When a party higher-up is furious about a slip-up, the trio hurryingly lobs blame at each other. Natu is astute enough to wink at the patriarchy queerness can enfold within. Flare-ups between Saleel and Urjita aren’t just common. Being slighted by her promptly makes him lash his male prerogative that she should just retreat to housework. He has the reckless audacity to complain to a female party superior that women shouldn’t be roped in anymore.

Vinchu is as biting as resigned. Yet, it also suggests an inward movement, a possibility of change. What he has been indoctrinated against does get to extend grace to him. Hiwale sharply catches the shock, the unexpected swell of generosity, before the epiphanic moment scales up in intensity, leaving Saleel scampering away. Without a word, the actor registers a flood of shame. Natu displays cleverness, warmth and humility in treading the delicate scene. The alternative, which a right-winger often shuts off without questioning, may be kinder, more open than his mistaken refuge. An abandoned stick, a tool of intimidation and violence, gives a poignant undertow to the film’s close. If you peeked a bit longer, hope is in there too.