Super Deluxe review: Rare specimen in our cinema

In an interview before the release of the film, the filmmakers of Super Deluxe had said that through their well-noted, eccentric trailer, they wanted to attract the right crowd.

While this may have looked like an “indie” move or even outright pretentious, you will know by the time you finish Super Deluxe that not everyone can digest it.

Multiple storylines make up the plot, but this is not a Woody Allen drama where a shared theme or some relation between the characters connect the stories.

What links them, ironically, is that these people have nothing to do with each other. The philosophical point that the film tries to make is that the actions of people have consequences on someone somewhere else.

The link, therefore, is that characters of one storyline have a cosmic ripple effect on the characters of the another.

So, are you to expect a lot of postmodern gimmickry from Super Deluxe? Yes, a lot of it is in fact that.

Yet, it is a film that can be genuinely profound at times. In the relationship between a child who wants to boast about his father, whom he finds out is a transgender (the great Vijay Sethupathi); in ground-breaking aphorisms spouted by a cuckolded man; in a religious nut who believes a god he's discovered will save his injured child, there's something very sad, but also very funny, albeit darkly.

Oscillating between comic and tragic, Super Deluxe has penetrating insights into our meaningless lives (it does not shy away from embracing nihilism) and our cruelty, which will hit us like a whip if we are the perpetrators, and soothe us like balm if we are the victims.

Such a large study of life must necessarily be amoral; a man who threatens two people into rape is shown being extremely sensitive to a caterpillar, while a woman who cheats on her husband (Samantha and Fahadh are such a joy) is one of the most fair people in the film. In fact, the original title of the film was “Aneedhi Kadhaigal” (Amoral tales).

Super Deluxe is for those who return to films over and over again with their own theories, always happy to discover a detail that will make them look at the film completely differently. It is a very rare specimen in our cinema.

There are a few people, among them Jafar Panahi, whom the makers have credited as influence, but some lovers of cinema may even be able to find traces of Stanley Kubrick or Terrence Malick.

This is not a film to devour, but one to regurgitate.