Baththa (2026) Review: A Gangster, a Boy, a Toilet

Madras, 1986. A school stands empty, its corridors thick with dust and the particular silence that only abandoned buildings manage. Into this space wanders an eight-year-old boy - small, hesitant, the kind of child who apologises to furniture he bumps into. Through a chain of small accidents and childhood panic, he ends up locking a gangster inside a toilet. Not a petty crook. A man whose name makes grown men lower their voices.

What follows is not a chase. There is no rescue squad, no ticking clock in the usual sense. Instead, Tharaneetharan does something braver: he lets two people sit with each other across a locked door. The gangster, stripped of his men, his weapons and his reputation, must grapple with hunger, with the slow creep of loneliness, and with a vulnerability he has spent decades burying. The boy, terrified at first, finds his fear slowly giving way to curiosity - and then to something resembling care. What grows between them across the film's long middle stretch is a bond that neither would have chosen and neither can quite name. The turning point, when it comes, lands with the weight of inevitability rather than shock.

The first thing to praise is the discipline of Vijay Sethupathi's performance. A lesser actor would have chewed through this role - bellowing, raging, performing captivity as theatre. Instead, he plays the gangster as a man gradually deflating. The menace is there in the early scenes, but watch how it leaks away. By the second hour, his voice has softened, his threats have become almost reflexive, and there is a moment of genuine pathetic bewilderment that is more frightening than any of his earlier fury. It is a study in what happens when power has nowhere to go.

Lijomol Jose and Santhy Balachandran make the most of supporting material that could easily have been functional, while the younger performers and the ensemble - Vishnu Govindan, Arjun Chidambaram, Hari Krishnan, Ajay Ghosh - fill out a world that feels lived-in rather than sketched. Tharaneetharan's camera favours stillness, long takes, doors and gaps and partial views. The humour that made his earlier work so quotable is present but submerged, surfacing in small behavioural details rather than punchlines.

The problem is the length. At 159 minutes, Baththa asks for a patience that its middle section does not always earn. The central conceit - two people, one locked door, a slow thaw - is genuinely rich, but the screenplay circles it more than it deepens it. Several beats repeat their emotional function with slight variations, and the outside world's subplots occasionally feel like interruptions rather than counterpoint. There is a tighter, more devastating 120-minute film buried in here. What we get instead is often beautiful but frequently overextended, and the climactic emotional payoffs land softer than they should because we have been waiting so long for them.

Still, when Baththa works, it works in a register few Tamil films attempt. It understands that the most dangerous thing you can do to a violent man is leave him alone with himself. And it understands that children see adults more clearly than adults ever suspect.

Pros

• Vijay Sethupathi's restrained, quietly devastating central performance
• A genuinely original premise that refuses obvious thriller mechanics
• Atmospheric period detailing and patient, observational camerawork
• Real emotional intelligence in the boy-gangster dynamic
• A supporting cast that gives the world texture beyond the central conceit

Cons

• The 159-minute runtime is punishing for the amount of story on offer
• The middle act repeats emotional beats rather than escalating them
• Some outside-world subplots dilute focus on the core relationship
• The climax does not fully deliver on the tension the setup promises

Baththa is a film that trusts its audience to sit still and watch two people change each other through a door. That trust is admirable, and much of what unfolds behind it is quietly extraordinary - particularly Sethupathi, who reminds us again why he is among the finest actors working in Tamil cinema today. But trust is not the same as momentum, and at nearly two and a half hours, the film mistakes patience for profundity in its weaker stretches. There is a masterpiece somewhere inside Baththa, waiting to be let out. What reaches the screen is a flawed, fascinating, frequently moving drama that is well worth your time - just bring a little patience of your own. It is not the thriller the marketing suggests, and that may be the best thing about it.