KUBERAA REVIEW
Cast: Dhanush, Nagarjuna Akkineni, Rashmika Mandanna, Jim Sarbh, Dalip Tahil, Sayaji Shinde
Director: Sekhar Kammula
Rating: 4.25/5
There’s a moment in Sekhar Kammula’s Kuberaa where a beggar, dressed in a borrowed suit, sits across from a billionaire who has never borrowed anything in his life. The beggar doesn’t know which fork to use; the billionaire doesn’t know what hunger feels like. It’s in these quietly devastating contrasts that the film finds its heartbeat—uneven at times, but unmistakably alive.
Let’s address the elephant in the room first: at three hours, Kuberaa tests your bladder and your patience in equal measure. The first hour moves like Mumbai traffic—stop, start, honk, crawl. Kammula takes his sweet time setting up his chess pieces, introducing us to the invisible people who beg at traffic signals and the visible ones who own the buildings those signals protect. It’s necessary world-building, but someone should have whispered in the editor’s ear that not every thread needs to be woven in real-time.
But here’s the thing—once the game begins, you forgive the sluggish setup. Because Dhanush, playing Deva the beggar, doesn’t just act; he inhabits poverty like a second skin. Watch him bathe under a leaking pipe beneath a “Save Water” sign, and you’ll understand more about urban inequality than any op-ed could teach you. His performance is so lived-in, so devoid of actorly vanity, that you forget you’re watching one of South India’s biggest stars. When he asks what day it is—because temple offerings vary by the day, and that determines whether he eats—it’s not a line of dialogue. It’s survival math.
Nagarjuna, as the compromised CBI officer Deepak, delivers what might be his most nuanced performance in years. There’s a beautiful tragedy in watching this lion pace his cage, his moral compass spinning wildly as he tries to navigate between conscience and circumstance. His scenes with Dhanush crackle with an unexpected chemistry—two men from different worlds discovering they’re both prisoners of the same system.
Jim Sarbh’s villain is deliciously corporate—the kind of man who probably has a meditation app on his phone while plotting murder over matcha lattes. He speaks Telugu with surprising fluency, adding another layer of credibility to his cold-blooded capitalist. Though his character occasionally veers into caricature (the infinity pool feels a bit on-the-nose), Sarbh grounds him with enough quiet menace to keep you unsettled.
The surprise package is Rashmika Mandanna, who could have been relegated to love interest duties but instead becomes the film’s emotional anchor. Her Sameera brings lightness without being lightweight, humor without becoming comic relief. There’s a lived-in quality to her performance that matches the film’s grounded aesthetic.
Where Kuberaa truly shines is in its refusal to simplify. This isn’t a straightforward David-versus-Goliath tale where the poor are noble and the rich are evil. Kammula understands that poverty doesn’t automatically confer virtue, just as wealth doesn’t guarantee villainy. The beggars in his film are complex—sometimes noble, sometimes petty, always human. Even the antagonist gets moments of quiet reckoning that complicate our hatred.
Devi Sri Prasad’s score knows when to roar and when to whisper, though it occasionally mistakes volume for emotion. The film’s visual language, courtesy of cinematographer Niketh Bommireddy, captures both Mumbai’s vertical aspirations and its horizontal desperations with equal clarity. The production design deserves special mention—from the antiseptic luxury of corporate boardrooms to the chaotic authenticity of street life, every frame feels purposeful.
But—and this is a significant but—the film stumbles in its final act. After building a complex moral maze, Kammula seems unsure how to lead us out. The climax aims for poetic justice but lands somewhere closer to convenient resolution. A subplot involving a pregnant woman feels manipulative in a film that otherwise treats its audience with intelligence. And there are moments when the social commentary stops being woven into the narrative and starts being announced from a soapbox.
Yet for all its imperfections, Kuberaa succeeds in being that rarest of creatures: a mainstream film with a brain, a heart, and a spine. It asks uncomfortable questions about who gets to be visible in our society and at what cost. It reminds us that every beggar was once someone’s child, that every corrupt officer was once idealistic, that every villain was once human.
Is it Sekhar Kammula’s best work? No. Is it his bravest? Absolutely. In an industry that often treats poverty as either comedy or tragedy, Kuberaa dares to treat it as complexity. For that alone, it deserves your three hours—bathroom breaks and all.