Thamma review: Ayushmann and Rashmika’s film is too self-aware for its own good

It has the same self-referential spirit as most of its recent offerings, which works sparsely if you are feeling magnanimous on a Diwali morning, but never enough to make you feel the right kind of good that such movies ought to. Thamma is fun the same way as watching a toddler totter around into objects at home and letting its short attention span make for some predictable entertainment.

Ayushmann Khurrana joins the franchise to see through an arc of epic metamorphosis, wherein a bumbling, naive newscaster, Alok Goyal, from Delhi must transform into the leader of a cult of Betaals. What’s a betaal in this context? The simplistic explanation is scattered across the 148-minute narrative, which imparts to us that a betaal (derived from the Hindu mythology’s paranormal being ‘vetala’) isn’t necessarily a vampire, but is still bloodthirsty, although forbidden from consuming human blood.

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It (a betaal could be a man or woman) is not alive on account of not having a beating heart, but is not fully dead either. It can leap across trees, buildings and mountains like a parkour artist in a video game, can live for hundreds of years together, can have fangs that can retract at will (or show up when you lie ‘through your teeth'), can moonlight as a cop or a dancer, and can basically function as human but with crazy additional privileges.

A love story, unrealised

It isn’t a matter of surprise, then, that Alok falls in love with Tadaka (Rashmika Mandanna), the sultry, kohl-eyed betaal he meets during an adventure trip in a jungle, the very first time he sees her. Why she falls for him in return almost immediately is a matter of convenience to the story, as well as a mystery that is likely to remain unsolved.

Why Tadaka lives by herself in a crashed plane deep in that forest (somewhere in the mountains of Northern India) — detached from her home tribe settled nearby at an ancient sanctum dedicated to a Goddess — is another question left unanswered in Thamma. The script, written by Niren Bhatt, Arun Fulara and Suresh Mathew, accommodates several such puzzles that try to add some girth to the material, but almost none of them manage to lend the required richness and detailing to the world that the film showcases.

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Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Yakshasan, the most powerful and evil betaal of the lot, has survived for over a millennium, but Thamma barely introduces us to him, let alone layering him with textures that an actor of Siddiqui’s calibre should deserve. A clandestine community of betaals living amidst urban civilisation, the string of hardline rules that they all live by, a reference to ghastly communal riots in the year 1947, and so much more feel part of the film’s cursory approach, which allows everything possible in its view to mindlessly trundle into its fold. Paresh Rawal, of all actors, feels repetitive and redundant in a role that is now an annoying staple of Hindi cinema, and one that could be played literally by anyone else.

Even the film’s main billing as a love story, aligned with the seriocomic tone of the MHCU, goes largely unrealised. The hook of forging romance between a mortal and a mystical creature demands a certain resonant intensity that made Stree (2018) tick, given how it utilises small-town Indian men’s bashful innocence and ignorance to tether us to its central conflict. Here, although Alok and Tadaka serve as perfect foils for each other, the chemistry needed to make their mighty far-fetched tale tick doesn’t reveal itself unless overly pronounced.

Too many promises, squandered

Khurrana’s Delhi lad act is cut from the same cloth that he has worn countless times before, while Mandanna’s performance is restricted to overt physicality and a few mildly tender flourishes, though she walks away with a better written role of the two. The love story, like everything else in the film, ultimately functions as a tool to further strengthen the meta foundation of the franchise, as other major players and sub-plots show up periodically to escalate the stakes, but rarely the excitement.

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Yet, those sporadic cameos become the film’s only salvaging force. Thamma’s sheen emerges in the moments of playful vigour that not only keep the madcapness from going fully out of control, but also keep the promise alive of something new and unexpected always being likely ahead. The numerous callbacks and segues to other instalments are now the marquee feature of the franchise, and the prospect of seeing its wide range of participants — from Varun Dhawan’s Bhaskar (Bhediya, 2022) to Sathyaraj’s Elvis Karim Prabhakar (Munjya, 2024) — as part of one story is going to remain hard to pass up. Khurrana’s involvement might complicate this ever-unravelling storyline in a few unwarranted ways, but the makers seem to know how to use their ephemeral tricks to stick their heads out of the water for as long as possible.

What the upcoming films could do is dial down the self-awareness as much as possible and instead, imbue the writing with a lot more purposefulness. While Stree and Munjya derived themselves from emotionally resonant folklore and intimacy, Thamma suffers from the fact that the ideas, despite the massive setting around, are extremely small and ordinary, with their payoffs being equally underwhelming. A world with mythic superheroes, werewolves, righteous spirits, conversations about gender dynamics and ecological balances, etc., must take itself more seriously, even when it is trying to make us laugh. Else, so many talents and promises would be squandered at once, as Thamma stands as proof.